The Kingdom in Exile
by izar ilunak
Summary: Fifteen years ago, the king was murdered by rebels and the crown prince Demetri stolen away, leaving his younger brother to take his place. Now, rebels have conquered a vast swathe of land to the south and have declared their own Kingdom in Exile, with the hostage prince as their King of Dust. Every king must have a queen... So the Rebel Selection begins.
1. Not Under Foreign Skies

**Chapter One: Not Under Foreign Skies**

* * *

_Weep not for me, mother.  
__I am alive in my grave._

\- Alina Akhmatova

* * *

They couldn't risk a fire. That would be too much light, too much smoke. The Wastelands were an absolute abyss of darkness when the sun went down over the horizon - any single speck of illumination would be as an inferno, undeniable and extinguished as easily as a candle. No, it was agreed, they couldn't risk a fire. So the cold settled into their bones, and they exhaled steam across piles of debris and broken glass, and lit their path by the stars and the thin sliver of moon that had managed to escape the oppressive mantle of the storm clouds above. They stole past the darkened windows of hard-working citizens, loyal to the crown, loyal to kings dead and newly crowned, loyal to the idea of Illéa, and they darted across the railway lines, gone still now with the placidity of deepest night, and they disappeared once more into the utterly dark desolation of the unclaimed hinterlands. Well, that wasn't entirely true - the Wastelands had been claimed by the Kingdom in Exile.

They couldn't risk a fire, but a whispered argument decided that they could risk the dull glow of a broadcast, stripped of colour, on a portable screen that their leader carried on his belt. They always watched the Report. They always had. Didn't matter what they were doing, or who had just died.

They always wanted to see their photos in the _Illéa's Most Wanted_ segment.

The Report only had images of four, though their inner circle numbered seven, and their ranks numbered seven thousand. There was an old mugshot of Wick, when his hair was still long and his cheekbones had yet to sharpen, young and somehow softer than he would become once the Wastelands had begun to whet all his gentler instincts. There was an official portrait of the General, back when he had been a real general and not one of an imagined army, his epaulettes impeccable, his hair parted with a severity, his boots shining. When it appeared, he always kicked up his dusty shoes and cocked his head and said, dismissively, "you can tell they're getting desperate if they're admitting I used to be theirs. Defection isn't meant to be possible." Then it was time for two blurry photos, taken at a distance and in spite of violent motion, only the vague silhouettes of noses and mouths discernable: Uzohola distinguishable by her cloud of brown curls and the wicked line of her jaw, Thiago recognizable as always by the long purple coat he had taken from the corpse of the king.

The government had only sketches of what they thought Täj and Vardi Tayna looked like, based on testimonies and guessworks, but the rebels' mole in the court had smuggled out copies to them some time last year and it was generally agreed that they were very poorly rendered indeed. Those images never appeared on the Report. Demetri said it was because the Crown didn't want to admit how little it knew about the men and women it blamed for the death of its king, and the theft of its first crown prince.

Usually the Report was a more relaxed experience - they would prepare their cold meals in silence, and scuff out a place to sit among the detritus of the war-that-had-been, and they would huddle close to peer at the tiny screen. The signal was poor enough that it wasn't always clear exactly which of the government's glossy propagandists had been trotted out onto the national stage to besmirch their good names and accuse them of all sorts of heinous crimes - most of which they had, in all fairness, committed. Usually there would be a summary of the night's wrongdoings, and the group would see what chaos they and their ilk had wrought on the nation: an exchange of gunfire here, land ceded there, a successful raid or a botched train derailment. Then, the _Most Wanted_, and the photos - "Wick, are you _posing_ for your _mugshot_?" - and the solemn warning that all seven could recite by heart - "_these men and women should be considered armed and highly dangerous_" - and, the only aspect which ever seemed to change, the prize for a tip that led to their arrest, which varied sometimes if they had been particularly productive earlier in the day. It had become a strange competition of whose head was worth the most to the Crown, and it wasn't really the Report until one of the seven had offered that tired observation: "I'll hand the rest of you in tomorrow and live like a king the rest of my life, just wait."

Then there would be an address from the Queen Regent or from the king-that-was-to-be, the boy Demetri still called brother. Those would be short, unmemorable platitudes about holding fast against encroaching darkness and believing in one another, some short epigram Vardi Tayna would invariably find amusing in that wryly ironic of hers, something that would make the General's eyebrows raise and start Wick on a whispered rant about the decadence of the royal court that would have Thiago hissing "_not here, not now, be_ quiet,_ damn you_." These brief speeches would inevitably offered with impeccable enunciation, the speaker impeccably dressed in layers of velvet and silk, their backs steel-straight, every inch the ruler.

Usually, the Report would then end with an image of a young boy. About seven years old, his eyes wide, posing somewhat awkwardly in that way that children have, one hand on a piano he would never learn to play, his blonde hair lightly tousled. And beneath it, the starkly printed letters, so that there could be no doubt as to his identity: **DEMETRI DUNIN**. And beneath _that_, a running tally of the days since he had been stolen from the castle during a rebel raid.

It was currently at 5470.

In five days, the royal court would mourn the fifteenth year that their crown prince had spent in the hands of the cruel rebels, and the rebels would celebrate his twenty first birthday.

(They had very special plans for this one.)

That was _usually_ how the Report ended, but tonight, that was not to be. For tonight, the screen did not fade out to rapturous applause, and the camera remained fixed on the starkly lit stage. The silence was total. The queen rose from her seat on the raised dais, and after a moment, the prince stood as well. There was not even a murmuring from the assembled crowd. All was still and quiet in Angeles, and all was still and quiet in the Wastelands as well. Thiago had his jaw clenched so tightly, it seemed to be at risk of breaking.

For tonight they numbered just five when they ought to have numbered six.

There was a scuffle just off-screen, and the General was dragged across the stage of the Report, his head slumped down, his entire body limp, a trail of blood tracing his path. They had stripped him of the army coat he always wore, even some twenty years after his defection from the Illéan forces; after only a few hours in their custody, he seemed gaunt, like all of his spirit had fled in anticipation of what was to come. The other five were not surprised to see how quickly all of this had occurred, for the General had always warned them of as much himself. "They know me, because they trained me," he would say when the topic came up. "If they catch you - any of you - they'll torture you until you're ready to tear your heart out of your chest to make them stop. But they'll kill me as soon as they get me."

"Let's make sure they don't get you, then," Demetri had taken to saying, and it was a promise the others had fully intended to keep.

And yet, there he was. And here they were. So far away, and so helpless to stop what was about to happen.

The General was deposited on his knees, centre-stage, and the prince moved - of course they would leave this to the prince, make it seem like vengeance, make it seem righteous - and the camera fixed on the young man's pale, determined face as he descended the steps to walk towards the man accused of murdering his father and his king.

But first, of course, there had to be a speech.

"Subjects of Illéa," he began. As always, his face was scrutinised by the five rebels for some similarity, however faint, between himself and Demetri. They were both blonde and tall, both handsome but in very different ways - Demetri was rugged and square-jawed and broad-shouldered, more like his uncle Set than his late father, who had been lean and classical. Mordred had inherited his mother Ysabel's prettiness, her hollow cheekbones and bee-stung lips, her almond eyes and expressive eyebrows. It always galled a little to see how attractive the royal family were. Fighting them might have been a little easier, Wick sometimes liked to joke, if they looked a little less like supermodels.

"It's the new blood," Uzohola would say. "Those _damn_ Selections. If every generation of your family married the most beautiful woman in the country, you might have ended up a bit less ugly, Wick."

"Subjects of Illéa," Mordred said. He seemed to have learned the entire speech by heart. He did not hesitate, or stutter. He spoke with a confidence and zeal."Kneeling before you is one of the greatest traitors Illéa has ever known. You need not be audience anew to the litany of crimes to which this man has subjected our nation, for we have grieved a thousand thousand times in the aftermath of atrocities he and his insurgents have wrought upon us. He took an oath to defend our nation, our king, and our people, and in response he has cut a swathe through this kingdom, murdered in cold blood my father the king, and abducted my older brother to hold as a hostage in the miserable destitution of the Wastelands. For this, and for the many other crimes he has committed, he may not be rehabilitated. He may never be released. I, the Crown Prince of Illéa, have passed the sentence of death, which shall be carried out immediately."

He did not step back, but held out his hand for a knife, which was handed to him by a court attendant clothed in pink. Mordred stepped forward and seized a handful of the General's hair to wrench back his head, and Vayna Tardi's hand tightened like a noose around Täj's wrist, her dark eyes fixed on the black-and-white image on the Report. Wick leaned in closer, as though searching for some kind of loophole, some trickery or falsity of the light, some way to deny the reality splashed across the screen in front of them. Uzohola turned her face away, and fixed her gaze on a few spent bullet cartridges on the ground a few feet away, though it was obvious by the tension in her shoulders that she was still paying attention to the most minute of sounds emitting from the tinny speakers. And Thiago fixed his gaze on his watch, slowly counting down the seconds, his brow furrowed, his eyes flicking between the screen and the ticking hand.

It was time.

Prince Mordred went to bring down the knife, and then the Report abruptly cut out, and the screen was filled with buzzing white noise and flickering static. The disruption lasted only a few seconds - the Report reappeared intermittently, brief flashes of blood and violence, but the only sound was a single voice layered over it all, a strong baritone with the slightest vestige of an Angeles accent. The General's last will and testimony, recorded days ago, before he had been captured, before he had been killed. The rebels focused on it closely. If their eyes shone with grief, then, in the dark, no one could see.

"Subjects of Illéa," the General said. "Speaking to you now is one of the greatest traitors Illéa has ever known. That is what your black widow queen would have you believe. And I will not deny the crimes I have committed. But what wrong I have done, I have done in the name of my nation, which is as dear to me as my own liver. Your kingdom has been denied to you by means of deceit; your king has been denied to you by means of arsenic. In a hundred years, maybe you will call us heroes. Some of us, perhaps, martyrs. Today you call us rebels in the Wasteland. Tomorrow, you shall call us citizens of the Kingdom in Exile, subjects of the Lost King himself. For you have been deprived of your true state, your true ruler, and true justice for too long. And as long as you subject yourself to the unjust laws of the despots you call the false queen Ysabel and her bastard son, Mordred, you will forever mourn the memory of the Illéa that once was and that once again could be."

They cut him off early. The government must have been trying to reassert the status quo, to impose the Report back on the airwaves, to trace the source of the disruption. The General's voice was abruptly cut off, as was the shuddering static, and replaced by the serenely calm visage of Demetri Dunin himself, his hair pushed back out of his face, only a small cut under his eye betraying the conditions to which he had been subjected during his time with the rebels.

"Good evening, everyone." His voice was as rich and smooth as honey. Captivity was a good look for him. "Sorry to interrupt your evening like this - but really, you're not missing much. My half-brother is about to behead my Administer for War, but such is the nature of war, and General Klahan would have been the first to acknowledge that. It was his voice you just heard - I think he did a rather marvelous job outlining it all, don't you?" The background of Demetri's broadcast could not be made out in any great detail - it was a plain concrete wall, splashed with a few graffiti slogans from a group of younger rebels who had been bored and restless and armed with enough spray-paint to do damage. Only one could be made out with any great clarity: _We could be kings_.

"He told the truth." Demetri smiled, and the resemblance to the dead king was striking in that moment. "My name is Demetri Dunin. I was rescued from the palace fifteen years ago. I am proud to say that _I_ am the true king of Illéa, and my Counsel the true government of Illéa, and my people the whole citizenry of this great nation. In time, we will liberate you all. For now, we shall begin the business of healing and governing in the land we have reclaimed from my stepmother, the black widow Ysabel. We shall welcome any and all who wish to join, in glory, the Kingdom in Exile. Already, we have been recognised as the true government of Illéa by the United Sultanates of the Mashriq, and by the Saharan Federation. They are the first among what is sure to be many."

This little fragment of optimism was enough to bring a slight smile back to Uzohola's face. "I don't think that's as impressive as he thinks it is," she murmured, her words barely breathed into the air. She turned back to the screen, and her smile widened to see the young man the rebels still called_ little Dimi_ acting every inch the aristocrat on an insurgent broadcast. "He must have a very poor Administer for Overseas."

She was speaking, of course, about herself. Most of these positions were to be held by some rebel commander or another, men so poorly educated they could barely read their own newly penned constitution, women more accustomed to the weight of a gun in their arms than the weight of fiscal responsibility on their shoulders. Wick was to be Administer for Social Matters. Thiago was to be Administer for Intelligence and Security. Vardi Tayna had yet to be offered a role, for there was no such title as Administer for Cynicism and Cyanide. Yet, she always reminded the Lost King dryly. No such title _yet_.

And he would reply, "_And here_ _I thought you wanted to be the queen_."

"_Can't a girl be both?_"

On the screen, Demetri continued calmly. "I know, as surely as I know my own name, how dearly you all crave peace. That is what I offer you now. I offer it not to my stepmother, or to her bastard son, the false king, or to those traitors who have sheltered them, and murdered in their name, and kept my throne from me. I offer it only to you, the ordinary and loyal citizens of Illéa. I offer you peace. I offer you normalcy."

Demetri's face wavered. The government were about to cut off the broadcast. The five rebels in the Wastelands began to gather their things to prepare for an escape even further south.

"And in the interests of that normalcy," Demetri continued, not allowing even a hint of urgency to slip into his voice despite movement around him suggesting his film crew were preparing for a panicked escape the second the camera was shut off. "I announce to you, my citizens, my subjects, my people, my Selection. Our new nation shall be one shared, one in which you shall all share equally - as citizen, as defender, as queen. And I promise - "

The screen went dark. The five were left in doused darkness. Vardi Tayna's voice: "let's get out of here, boys." She had let go of her comrade's wrist, and now she set her shoulders determinedly against the memory of the General dying on the screen before her.

A single point of light flickered in the darkness. Täj's gaunt face was illuminated in sharp relief and contrast as he lit his cigarette. If there were any snipers waiting for them in the shadows, they did not risk the shot.

"To the General," Uzohola said softly. "To his sacrifice." She stood, and brushed dust off her trousers.

"To our new king. To our old hostage." Thiago's voice was dryly amused. "May he outlive us all."

"And if he doesn't," Wick added, a smile in his voice. "Let's hope they kill him quickly."

* * *

**Hello, readers! If you have made it this far, thank you for reading and please let me know what you thought. I know it's pretty long, and mainly sets up the world, so there will be more information about the Selection in the next chapter. So that you can start sending in characters, I will provide the most important information here:**

**In Illéa, the rebels now completely control the land to the south which was once Mexico (known as the Wastelands) and most of the provinces south of Angeles. They are still fighting for control of yet more provinces, and partially control the rural areas of many other regions. Where they control a province, the rebels begin to set up their own government to replace the central government - they collect their own taxes, use insurgents as police, and set up their own schools and hospitals, etc. They call themselves the Kingdom in Exile, and have begun to petition other countries for official recognition as a nation in their own right. Fifteen years ago, they succeeded in abducting the crown prince from the palace, and now, five days before what would have been his twenty-first birthday, a rebel has appeared claiming to be the lost crown prince, now accepting his position as king of the Kingdom in Exile. To ****legitimize**** his position and win loyalty of more Illéans, they are going to hold a Selection as a propaganda move: "see, _we're _the real Illéa". The characters in this chapter are the "inner circle", or the rebels that the King in Exile has chosen to join his Cabinet as "Administers", which is a portmanteau of Minister/Administrator. **

**This section is just the prologue - I don't want to give away the whole plot just yet! You can find more info on my profile, but if you want more information or have any questions, please feel free to shoot me a PM, I'd love to chat to you about any ideas or queries you have!**** The form for the SYOC is also on my profile. Like the original Selection, this is set in a world that has most of our technology - Angeles is more advanced, the rebel-controlled areas are a less advanced.**

**That should be everything - please do let me know what you thought in a review! Thanks again!**

**\- Izar**


	2. The Shape We're In

**Chapter Two: The Shape We're In**

* * *

_Load the car and write the note, seize your bag and grab your coat_  
_Tell the ones that need to know: **w****e are headed north**_

\- Robert Crawford

* * *

The compound, all dozen low grey buildings of it, squatted in a small hollow in the hills, with mountains rising on every side. To the north, looking down at what had once been a Sonage village, the house that Demetri's parents and their parents and probably their parents as well had called a winter home - arches and spires gave way to gloomy windows framed by thick dark curtains that they knew from experience were nailed in place over the glass. The winding path up to it was framed on either side by what the rebels called _hanging trees_, chestnuts and willows with twitching branches casting questionable shadows, and opened up out onto a small gravel foreyard where Demetri was easily spotted, with his arms folded and only a few drops of blood on the toe of his shoe belying that his escape from the broadcasting center had not been entirely smooth. He smiled as he saw the five approach. He had always had the easiest, bright smile of the lot. Uzohola had said that he could single-handedly light up the night with that expression, so natural and contagious did it seem.

It was a good thing that he was the one they were putting on the throne.

"You took your time," Demetri said, as the truck disgorged the five rebels. They had traveled deep into the Wastelands by foot, the thought of the Report seeming to dog at their footsteps like a malevolent specter as they had traveled through the night. They had headed for the shore, watched the sun rise over the waver of the far-away green waves at the precipice of the horizon, kicked sand here and there and waited for their boat with their shoulders set against any intrusion of grief whenever the General's absence seemed particularly apparent. Uzohola had slipped off her shoes to stand in water shin-deep, dark eyes fixed on the dawn, a rainbow of light splitting into spectra as it struck the frayed ends of her wild hair. Wick and Thiago had huddled by the rocky shore, Wick scanning the waves for their boat and Thiago's gaze fixed towards back the way that they had come, though in the desolation that stretched behind them it was clear that anyone trying to follow them could be spotted from several miles away. Vardi Tayna had taken a seat on a rock under the dunes, arms around her knees, the memory of the General etched into the line of her eyes, and after a few minutes of milling aimlessly at the edge of the beach, Täj had joined her, his coat collar turned up against the light ocean breeze coming off the Pacific, still chain-smoking like his life depended on it. Eventually, the Solangean fisherman had appeared on the edge of the world, his little wooden boat flung back-and-forth haphazardly by the waves, and it was only when they were back on the water and leaving the land behind that Thiago had stretched out and put his coat over his face to block the harsh glare of the sun and said, quite determinedly, "sleep now. Rest will be a foreign concept once this Selection begins." They had slept on the boat, and slept in the truck, all except Täj, who seemed to have an unlimited supply of cigarettes in his collar and under his cuff.

"Yeah," Thiago said now. "We took our time."

They did not bow to their new king. How strange that would be, Uzohola had to think, how strange to bow to the boy you had known since you were both gap-toothed with skinned knees and big, childish eyes. Instead, Uzohola kissed him on the cheek - "_I think you need to shave, Dimi_", she said, and he replied with a smile, "_stubble is very fashionable in Angeles these days, darling, haven't you heard_?" - and Wick clapped him on the shoulder - "_you did great in the broadcast, we'll make a king of you yet_" - and Thiago shook his hand and for a moment the two men seemed to communicate something silent with their eyes about what had happened on the Report - "_not your fault, Wesick, not your fault at all, this was how he would have wanted it_" - and then it was Vardi Tayna's turn to step forward so that the exiled king could put his arms around her and she could put her face into his shoulder and say "_well, that's that_".

"To lose one father is a tragedy," Demetri said softly.

"To lose a second," Vardi Tayna added. "Gross carelessness." She withdrew, and put a hand on Demetri's cheek, covering the little wound that had appeared so incongruous on their illicit broadcast. The General's golden ring glittered on her middle finger. "Well, he was sick of us anyway. Probably glad to get away from all of this."

That was the way of the rebellion. No time to mourn. No chance to grieve. Contort your sorrow into anger and_ use it_.

"I'll give him this," Demetri replied. "It's great motivation." He accorded Täj only a firm nod in greeting - no more was needed - and, without speaking, the entire group moved into the great house to discuss what was on everyone's minds.

The vestibule inside the front door opened up into a high-vaulted, immense room that might once have been a ballroom. Long tendrils of thorns strangled the broad marble columns here and there that had once held up the intricately designed ceiling. After years of neglect huge segments of the roof had collapsed in, exposing the ivy-strewn space to the pale blue sky above. The herringbone tiles were thoroughly littered with fallen chunks of concrete, torn and abandoned books, rotting wood that might have once held up a balcony or a stage. The entire space was a strange and awful wreck, the thoroughly mutilated corpse of a stately home. And yet, in the centre of the room was an old round table pulled in from some other less-destroyed room, scuffmarks in the dust marking the path it had taken across the cavernous space.

"It's not quite the throne room in Angeles," Demetri said. There was that smile of his again.

"It'll have to do," was Thiago's response.

They pulled up old wooden chairs, and as they did so, a few of the rebels who had accompanied Demetri drifted down to meet them, grim-faced and weary-looking. They had Bertram Givre with them, his skin stretched thin over brittle bones, his age more apparent now than ever, and he was helped into his chair by two of Demetri's bodyguards, between Thiago and the stone-faced Northern Warden. There was the Ambassador to the United Sultanates, if you could call a fugitive chased so far your _ambassador_, and here were the military commanders who spent their days and nights repelling the black widow queen's forces and eking out what new territory they could for their chosen kingdom. They had not set a place for the General, nor left one empty, as might have been traditional. When you were in the business of making kings and crafting kingdoms, you could not afford to be sentimental.

Thiago's eyes darted around the table, and he could not help but laugh. Here was the new Council for the Kingdom in Exile - dark-eyed teenagers in dusty hoodies, young adults with bruises on their faces and holes in their shoes, a few hardened rebels made near-feral by their time in the Wastelands, a single old man who might once have been Minister in old King Maxon's time some hundreds of years hence. And uniting them all, the one they called Demetri, his seat still empty, closest to the door, for the King in Exile was over at a half-rotten table in the corner, filling a glass of bourbon for himself. He put the ice in methodically. Thiago thought it likely he was the only one to see how the king-to-be's hands shook as he did so.

When he turned, Demetri smiled to see the set-up of the cabinet, and set a jovial hand on the back of Täj's chair as he passed. "The finest Round Table there ever was - Arthur must be green in his grave."

Vardi Tayna, still without title or command, but nonetheless occupying the space between Uzohola and Wick, like a thorn that wouldn't be dislodged, remarked darkly, "that'd be the decomposition, I imagine."

Demetri chuckled. He took his seat, then, and there was the slightest shuffle as papers were produced and notes aligned and the five of the inner circle settled back in their chairs to hear of what had been planned for their new kingdom while they had been lighting fires in their old one. The Northern Warden had been pronounced such because of how quickly and surely she had conquered those coldest provinces, and ensured that all who remained within the borders of Whites and Yukon had pledged their earnest allegiance to the Kingdom of Exile, and the lost king at its head. She didn't have much to say - the more remote regions were the easiest to hold, particularly while the Crown's forces were still focused on retaining control of provinces closer to the capital, but they were so far removed from the southern heartland of the rebellion that it was often easy to forget that the Kingdom in Exile had taken root so solidly across so much land. They had set up schools, Devery Atiqtalaaq reported. Täj's pen moved across the page like it was independent of him, recording it all. They had set up schools, and they had restored electricity to nearly seventy percent of the territory. They had to work quickly before winter arrived to wreak havoc, but she was confident that, with the money funnelled from south to north through raids in the wealthier provinces, that this could be accomplished. In the rebel heartlands to the north and south, the Selection was proving to be a very popular prospect. Of course, anything Devery Atiqtalaaq promised the northerners would prove popular. It was a quality that the rebels had to appreciate and fear in equal measure - for it was all well and good to have a popular commander who could sway those she conquered to the reign of their new king, but, Bertram Givre was fond of reminding the others, a popular commander could easily a usurper make. It wouldn't take much for Atiqtalaaq to decide that she preferred being queen to her people over being a mere warden for the faraway rule of a young king.

But for now, she seemed content to act as governor and report back to Demetri. After her report, it was time for Bertram Givre to, very slowly and laboriously, deliver a breakdown of the finances, if you could call them that. What they had pilfered, stolen and reaved from the regions they had savaged during some onslaught or other, what munitions remained in the stores, what food they had managed to distribute to those refugee camps on which they relied for new blood. It was a delicate balance, Bertram always said - make them feel that Angeles has forsaken them, but do not allow them to starve. A hungry man will go to war for bread, but a starving man can't exactly shoot straight. It was the kind of callous clear-thinking that the leadership kept Bertram around to provide, for he had held some government position or another for as long as anyone could remember, in the time of Trajan and the time of Trajan's father, and the time of Trajan's grandfather as well for all anyone knew. If the General had been the most prominent defection from the central forces, then Bertram had been the only defection from the royal court.

Demetri himself excepted, of course.

Then it was time for discussion of attacks and strategies and land ceded and land won, and Thiago had his words to put in, and Wick could contribute here and there with plans for ensuring that towns were not merely taken but were swallowed whole into the open maws of the Kingdom in Exile, which was proving to be a hungry beast indeed. Progress had stalled along their western fronts, a few of the field combatants were saying now, for Angeles was realising what they were up against and determined to let them advance no further into the heart of the nation. It would fall to a slow war of attrition if they weren't careful, and Illéa had a lot more men to throw onto and under the battlefield than the Lost King did. That was where Thiago and the other inner circle came over - getting past those fronts, disappearing into the nation, and striking true.

Which, of course, led to Vardi Tayna. She had been in the palace in Angeles only forty hours early, and smuggled out what amounted to a fistful of information from the double agent that they kept embedded in the royal court, unknown even to the queen herself. In the past, she had reported exclusively to the General and to Thiago, who would go to the rebel leadership with whatever she had filched which was worth discussing. Now, she said what little she had to say - "Vardi Tayna," Bertram Givre said, rather aghast, "this isn't intelligence, this is just _gossip_" - and again Täj's pen seemed to devour it all, almost quicker than she could speak.

Throughout it all, there was the unmistakeable impression that the entire room was just impatient, waiting to talk about that which was on everyone's mind, waiting to hear what, exactly, Demetri had planned for this Selection.

And yet, when it came time to discuss it, Demetri just smiled and nodded and thanked everyone for their time. That in itself wasn't much of a surprise - Uzohola wasn't sure just how much of this had been his idea, or how much of it he would be controlling - and neither was the fact that as his lieutenants and advisors and Administers went to stand, the Lost King gestured that his inner circle should remain where they were, so that they might tell him of their bad deeds in Illéa on that most need-to-know basis. Although he was not counted among their number, they did not doubt that Bertram Givre would not hesitated to have remained where he was if he desired to listen in, but today he gestured for Devery Atiqtalaaq to help him from his chair and out of the room. Gradually, men and women filtered from the room until it was only six remaining once again, and the General's absence was again like the phantom pain of a missing limb, undeniable and overpowering.

Demetri stretched out his arms as though to embrace the huge room. "Well? What do you think?"

"You're holding the Selection _here_?" Uzohola's eyes flitted about the thoroughly wrecked space.

"The visible parts of it. Givre was talking about producing our own Report here once a week. Pre-record it, smuggle it out to a broadcast centre when we can, distribute to loyal families, air it in our settled lands and overseas if we can manage it..." Demetri dropped his arms. "Let the world see what we can accomplish."

"And the invisible parts of it?"

Wick answered that question. "Keep it moving. Can't risk settling in some compound that they could bomb from the air... a Selection on the run, isn't that the plan?"

"Sounds kind of romantic," Uzohola said, amused, "when you put it like that."

Demetri winked at his old friend. "That's certainly the general atmosphere we're going for, Uzo. It _is_ a Selection." He looked at Thiago, who had risen with the others but had not left, and paced now along what might have been the edge of the dance floor, dearly lost in thought. "It'll be a lot of work for you and your spies, Wesick."

"We can manage." Thiago almost smiled. "Sometimes I think all the other parts of the rebellion just slow us down. You get us the names, we'll get you the information. Don't worry about my little birds, your Highness."

Vardi Tayna's sharp smile served as excellent confirmation of Thiago's words, but the expression faded quickly as she looked at the new king with something stirring in her dark eyes. Grief, perhaps - it had been a rushed, busy few hours since the General's death, and she clearly had yet to process what exactly had befallen the man she held so dear. Or maybe it was anger, or frustration, for Demetri cut her off almost as soon as she began to speak, with an expression that suggested they had argued about this before. "Demetri, this Selection -"

"What about it?" Demetri's eyes were very hard.

"What's it for?"

Demetri made a face. "I thought you said you _watched_ my broadcast."

Wick laughed. Even Uzohola couldn't hold back a smile. Täj had set down his pen, but now he was turning his lighter in his hand, so fast that it was just a blur of silver between his fingers.

"Is it to find you a wife?" Vardi Tayna's voice was steady, but brittle. "Or is it to find the kingdom a queen? Or is it..."

What the third option was going to be, they did not hear, because Thiago cut in. "It's a _Selection_, Vardi Tayna. It's either. It's both."

Demetri met the girl's eyes very steadily. "I don't know what you think you're asking, Tayna."

She curled her lip, but said nothing. Thiago had returned to his pacing when Vardi Tayna stood, reached into her pocket, and tossed an envelope on the table in front of Demetri as she walked towards the door. Demetri raised an eyebrow and turned to look at the dark-haired girl, but it was Täj who spoke.

"What's that?"

Uzohola thought they might have been the first words he had uttered in several days - his vocal chords sounded like they had almost rusted from disuse. He was not the verbose sort, their Täj. Uzohola hadn't heard him speak for several weeks after she had first encountered him in the Wastelands. There had always been someone else around to give voice to what needed to be said aloud, and they could always leave the quiet paranoiac to his chain-smoking and his suspicious glances and his chicken-scratch maps of the hinterlands that the General had always trusted more than any satellite-generated rival.

"My application form." Vardi Tayna threw the words over her shoulder. "For the Selection." She did not look back at them, but went out of the room and down the front steps and out of sight. Täj looked at the envelope she had dropped like it was an open wound, and Demetri sighed but seemed unable to hold back his smile as he picked it up and tucked it into his jacket.

"You know," he said, to no one in particular. "That's actually a bit of a relief. I was a little worried no one would want to join.

Thiago coughed out a bark of a laugh. "Congrats. Now you have an entirely _different_ set of concerns."

He put a hand on Demetri's shoulder as he passed him, and then spymaster followed spy out of the building, the dead king's coat fluttering lightly in the wind that was lashing in the open doors and through the wounded ceiling. The four that remained watched them go in silence, until Demetri said, quite softly, "you'll stay, won't you? All of you. During the Selection."

He said it to them all, but he was looking at Täj, and was rewarded with a nod from the pale young man. The new king seemed very relieved indeed to have earned this assent.

"I'm glad," Demetri said. And then, yet again, he lit up the room with that smile. Whoever won this Selection, Uzohola thought, would be a very fortunate girl indeed. "After all, where would Arthur be without his Lancelot?"

"Alive," was Täj's reply.

* * *

**I'm very sorry if this chapter seems a little bit like filler, but I wanted to try to explain the world and Selection more fully to help you all to create your characters. Please do let me know what you thought - I really loved reading all your reviews and PMs, thank you so so much!** **I really appreciate absolutely any and all feedback you can give me.**

**A few of you have asked about the unusual names of the rebels in this story. Most of them have been chosen to be accurate to the ****ethnicity**** and culture of the characters. So, for example, Wick is Native American, and his name comes from a ****Tla-o-qui-aht chief, while Uzohola has a Zulu name, Klahan has a Thai name, and so on. I hope this helps!**

**There are still loads of spots open in the Selection! **

**Thanks so much. I hope you enjoyed!**

**\- Izar**


	3. The Theory Now Goes

**Chapter Three: The Theory Now Goes**

* * *

_The rose is a rose,_  
_And was always a rose._

_\- _Robert Frost

* * *

If there was one thing you learned when you joined the rebellion, it was just how much Thiago loved to clean. Well, maybe he didn't love to clean - but he really did love a place to be clean, which was why when the inner circle arrived at the first of two dozen safe houses that had been prepared for the Selection, Thiago was standing outside with a sweeping brush in either hand and a cloth mask over his mouth to shield him from dust. "Get to it," Thiago said. There was no _hello_, no _how are you_, no _how's your week been_.

It was four days since the Selection had been announced. They were due to broadcast their second rebel Report in one week, announcing the girls that had been Selected to compete for Demetri's hand. And for the past four days, Thiago and his network of whisperers and watchers had been alive and as active as they had ever been, finding out all that could be found out about the girls that had been chosen. They did not even pretend that the Selected would be chosen by random lottery, as was traditional. What was the point in such a blatant mistruth?

The first of the safe houses was a stately house in a ghost town that the rebels were painstakingly repairing, half-fixed house with doors hanging open, burned-down shops with merchandise placed carefully back on the shelves, repaved roads without person or vehicle to be seen for miles. The building in question was set a little apart from the others, with only desert and scrubland stretching out behind it. It had clearly once belonged to a wealthy family, but some years before the war, it had been divided into apartments to be sublet to the lower castes, and its outside face was pockmarked with stairs and extraneous doors and balconies rusted through after years of neglect. Vardi Tayna was sitting on the sill of a window that had been caved in, tiny shards of jagged glass still sticking out from the sides like a malevolent smile. By her attire, it was clear that she had been cleaning at Thiago's behest for most of the day already, but she still had enough energy to smile and wave at the others as they arrived, and mouth _get out of here while you can_.

But it was too late, so while Demetri went upstairs to inspect the room that was to serve as his royal chambers, such as they were - "don't tell him," Vardi Tayna said to Wick, quite conspiratorially, "but there's still a nest of spiders in the wardrobe" - the others were equipped with brooms and cloths and bleach and dispatched to the first and second floors, which were to belong to the inner circle. Other rebels had been and gone, earlier in the day, to repair and clean the higher floors that would be given over to the Selected girls, so the space felt very large and very empty as Wick and Vardi Tayna set about cleaning what had clearly once been a treasured music room, a grand piano in the corner the last vestige of grandeur to remain uncorrupted in the cavernous space. After a few hours, Demetri reappeared, and sat at the piano, and began to tap out a light sonata while the other two worked - "four days a king," Wick remarked darkly, "and he treats us like the help" - and the hours melted by quite industriously.

Then, from upstairs, there was a scream, and even as Wick jumped up from his seat to respond to it, he saw that Vardi Tayna was half-way up the stairs with Thiago at her heels. Wick had seen what happened to people who made the mistake of messing with Uzohola Ndlovukazi. If Thiago went to follow Vardi Tayna upstairs, Wick was sure that it was only with the vague intention of pulling her off the remains of whatever poor fool had tried it this time. But before they could reach the landing, Uzohola had appeared at the railing overlooking the vestibule, her shoulders bare, holding her t-shirt up over her chest to protect her modesty, no apparent fear in her eyes. "There's _hot water,_" she declared, and then she disappeared again, for the race upstairs was changed from panic to desperation, and Wick didn't hold back from joining in.

By the time he reached the second floor, Uzohola had barricaded the bathroom, and even Demetri didn't seem immune from a kind of amused frustration as he hammered at the door and said, through the wood, "Ndlovukazi, I swear on my dead father, if you use it all up..."

Uzohola's shout was muffled by running water."I need to do my _hair_, Dimi!"

Vardi Tayna looked at Täj, who had appeared quite silently at the back of the group. She said, with barely restrained glee, "I think there's another bathroom downstairs," and those two were gone before Thiago could protest to the empty air that if anyone was going to have a shower for the first time in what felt like years, it should probably be the young man they had just crowned their king. Demetri laughed and put a hand on Thiago's shoulder and said, "Wesick, I think they need it more than I do," a sentence that was answered in turn with a punch on the arm from Wick.

"Not all of us piss perfume like you, your Highness."

Demetri laughed. "Right, while those three are causing a draught, I'll get started on food."

"First hot meal in three weeks." Thiago shook his head. "I cannot _wait_."

Wick looked mournfully at the closed door, under which thick clouds of steam had started to seep into the hallway outside. "And this is with only six of us in the building. God help me, I might not survive this Selection."

Demetri's smile felt like coming home. "You and me both, Harjo."

Uzohola was clearly tempted to stay in the bathroom for the rest of the night, but after about twenty minutes she appeared at the door of the shared kitchen on the first floor, clad in the thin camisole and football shorts that she usually slept in, her hair put up into a silk wrap that she had stolen from some stately home in Fennley months ago. Vardi Tayna and Täj didn't seem to have found a second bathroom, so they had decamped to the kitchen, where Täj had his head tipped back, fair hair hanging into the sink. Vardi Tayna stood above him, wielding with some recklessness a metal cup filled with hot water, and she was rinsing his hair, rivulets of water running across his forehead and down the individual white-gold strands like a baptism. Demetri had set up a little portable stove on one of the counters, and the aroma of cooking meat and mixed spices was hanging low over the kitchen, covering them like a blanket. Wick and Thiago were straightening a broken table and collecting chairs with enough legs to hold weight, and someone had left an old mp3 player on the shelf above the doorway, playing tinny, cheerful tunes: "_left the house this morning, bells ringing filled the air, wearin' the cross of my calling, and on wheels of fire I come rollin' down here_..."

There was something familiar about it all, Uzohola thought. Years ago, when they were still only fourteen or fifteen and the idea of crowning any sort of king seemed a silly fantasy, the prospect of Demetri being that king seemed laughable, these kind of scenes had been commonplace - the inner circle would descend on a ruined house in a newly devastated town from which to run their operations, and someone would cook, and the General might produce a bottle of rum pilfered from the officer's stores, and if Thiago was in a good mood he would start shuffling a pack of cards, and they'd sit about the room and hurl insults at one another until the night had tired of being night, and they moved on to the next ruined town, the next building's carcass, the next job. The General would always throw the empty bottle at the wall before they left - "if it smashes," he would remark darkly, "very bad luck".

It almost always smashed. "Maybe you shouldn't try not throwing it so hard," Vardi Tayna had said once, and then had to sprint laughing out of the room as the next bottle the General threw was aimed in the vague vicinity of her head.

And just like that, it hit Uzohola for the first time, like being punched in the mouth, that the General was gone, and they would never see him again, and they would never hear him tell another grim war story with some darkly funny punchline. He would never again stay on guard outside the compound with his rifle leaning against his arms, always telling the others to get some sleep while he took the first and last watch. He would never again slide into the passenger seat of a rebel truck and tutor Uzohola in mastering what little amounted to evasive driving techniques in the Wastelands ("drive over it!"), never again commandeer the kitchen to strew flour about and make dumplings in anticipation of Vardi Tayna's return from a particularly long mission embedded in the heart of the capital, never again trace out a map in the sand and tell the others, quite solemnly, "now, this is not _exactly_ drawn out to scale...". Uzohola knew that the General had been a killer. He had orchestrated the bombing of hospitals, had arranged for the derailment of trains, had ordered the destruction of entire towns. And he had taught all he knew of killing to Uzohola, and to the others. But he had been a kind of father, not the doting kind, but a constant and reassuring presence, a reminder that if she fell there would be someone to catch her, someone to pull her up and keep her running, someone to patch her up and remind her not to let it happen again.

But for an instant, she could almost imagine that he was there, slouching in a seat by the window and pouring out glasses of mekhong, naming each one in turn: "Uzo, Thiago, _kra-chok_, Täj, Wick, a _very_ small one for the kingling..."

Demetri would put up a token protest, but even he had never succeeded in staying annoyed at the General's jibes for any length of time. He was a peacemaker, was their Demetri. He was a peacemaker, because the rebellion told him to be one.

He looked over at Uzohola now, and gave her a soft smile. "I know, I know. I'm not doing it right." He gestured to the simmering pan in front of him, a poor approximation of the flavourful Saharan stews Uzohola's father had taken to cooking in the Wastelands, where rabbits were plentiful and spices long-lived.

Uzohola laughed. "It smells great, your Highness."

Demetri rolled his eyes. "Oh, not this with you too."

But again, he couldn't seem to stay annoyed for longer than a few moments. The kitchen was cozy - Wick and Thiago had hammered planks over the broken windows and stuffed rags into the holes in the wall, so the warmth from the stove and the running tap had no avenue to escape into the night sky, and instead filled the room. Uzohola felt abruptly bone-weary, like she had not slept in many years. She could not remember the last time she had spent the night in a bed, rather than sleeping on the ground in the Wastelands or curled up in the back of some car.

Maybe this Selection would have some perks after all.

Vardi Tayna had produced a very sharp pair of scissors, and was very carefully cutting Täj's hair, frayed locks falling into the sink, the other rebel's eyes closed as though she had put him to sleep with the quiet rhythm of it all. She must have caught Demetri looking over, for the spy smiled at the king and said, "don't suppose you fancy a restyling before your next appearance on the Report, Highness?"

"Letting you near me with a blade," was Demetri's reply. "I'm not a _total_ idiot, Vardi Tayna."

She made a face that suggested she doubted very much the veracity of this statement, and he laughed and went to serve up the dinner.

Whatever their argument, Uzohola thought, whatever unspoken tension had led to that quiet fight a few days ago, when Vardi Tayna had flung her application at Demetri and entered the Selection without anyone's say-so, without telling any of the other rebels what she intended to do, they had clearly decided to set it aside and get on with what was important. If anyone else in the group was curious about what exactly had led to the fracture - Uzohola thought some had a better idea about it than others - than they similarly had pledged themselves to tactful silence. She doubted that they had spoken about it. The inner circle usually didn't need to put voice to these kind of unspoken consensuses. They knew each other better than that.

"Get it while it's hot," Demetri said, but the others needed no encouragement, and total silence fell on the kitchen while they dug into the food, Wick wolfing it down so quickly that he burned his tongue and throat. Not even that slowed him down. It was a companionable quiet. Uzohola knew she had to treasure it while it lasted. Täj barely touched his food - that, too, was almost reassuring in its predictability - but instead watched the sun fall through the lone crack between boards through which the light outside still poured into the kitchen and dried his hair with a towel. Thiago pulled files from his bag, and Vardi Tayna began to sort through the pile of myriad scrawled notes as Demetri said, "this is the Selected, then?"

"The first four," Thiago said. The file was thick enough to make the plates bounce when it hit the table. "Reports on their backgrounds, families, pressure points..."

Wick's smile was mischevious. "The first _five_, isn't it?" He handed Demetri a crumpled piece of paper. "Your Highness, this is my freelance report on the one they call Vardi Tayna. Dominica. Nasty piece of work, I advise you eliminate her on the first day..."

Demetri crumpled the paper into a ball without looking at it, and flicked it at Wick's head. He exchanged a slight smile with Vardi Tayna as he did so. "You're proving yourself an invaluable Administer for Social Matters, young Wickaninnish."

"I take my job _very_ seriously," Wick replied with a grin.

"Clearly."

Then it was Thiago's turn to deliver the debrief of the girls the rebel high command had thus far approved, their family backgrounds, and photos were passed about - not the glossy, posed headshots that would appear on the Report once the Selected were all confirmed, but grainy surveillance images stolen and shot by Vardi Tayna over the past few weeks. Wick could not help but watch Demetri's face closely as each was shown to him in turn - here was a red-haired girl in what might have been a refugee camp, her green eyes big and bright, and here was a dark-skinned girl with twin braids on the arm of some Angeles celebrity, and here was a skinny, slightly dishevelled blonde who seemed to be staring straight into the lens, though Vardi Tayna made it her business to never be seen - and it did not escape Wick's notice that Täj was also watching Demetri's face very closely, as though attempting to divine the other boy's opinions from the minutest change in expression.

"Very good," was all Demetri said, each time, and put the photo back on the table, where it was taken up by Täj and Uzohola in turn, and Wick watched them as well to see what they made of each one. He wondered if they would each have their favourites. He thought it was inevitable that they would. Täj spun a picture between his fingertips - a photo taken at an ice rink, a skater captured mid-spin, dark hair flying - and caught Wick watching him, but said nothing.

Täj usually said nothing.

That night, they did not stay up late as they had done in years past, whiling away the hours of starlight with alcohol and old stories. And though they had prepared rooms for the Selected, and for themselves as well, Täj was the only one who retired to an actual bed for the night. Without speaking about it, the rest of the rebels ended up in what had once been the sitting room on the ground floor. Wick stretched out on one of the moth-bitten couches with his coat over his shoulders, asleep as soon as he was horizontal, and Uzohola curled up in a pile of blankets between two fallen bookshelves, like she was lying in a nest of torn pages of poetry. Thiago did not stay for the night, but was away for the business of gathering information on the rest of the Selected, and though Vardi Tayna probably should have departed with him, she and Demetri put their sleeping bags together in the corner of the room, where the rain would not reach them during the night. There was still a hole in the ceiling that had to be repaired, through which they could see the stars, and if any of the rebels had difficulty sleeping, Demetri's quiet recitation of their names - _wurren, tarazed, nash_ \- would have been as good a lullaby as any to send them to sleep quickly.

When the clocks struck midnight, no one was left awake to wish the lost crown prince a happy birthday.

They did not dream.

* * *

**Hey, guys! Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed. Please let me know what you thought. I know it is a little shorter than the two that came before, my apologies! I just wanted to get the setting established for when the submitted girls all arrive, and the Selection begins in earnest. **

**This is hopefully the last filler chapter, as the next planned chapter will be the rebel Report announcing the Selected girls and the story should hopefully proceed from there. So, hopefully it gives you a good understanding of the characters. The deadline for submission of characters is next Sunday, but obviously if you get your characters in to me sooner, they can play a larger role in the next few chapters that I will be writing this week. Any characters that are accepted so far have been mentioned in this chapter in their photos!**

**Let me know if you have any questions. I would really love to hear your thoughts on this chapter. Thank you all so much for your support so far, it means so so much to me!**

**\- Izar**


	4. They Will Sing To Me

**Chapter Four****: They Will Sing To Me**

* * *

_And time yet for a hundred indecisions,  
__And for a hundred visions and revisions_

\- TS Eliot

* * *

Any good propagandist knew how to best make an entrance, so Demetri found it absolutely no surprise at all to hear that the Report's director had opted to perform a HALO jump into the Belcourt broadcast centre from which they were to broadcast the announcement of the Selected girls. The director would land into an utterly silent compound, for Thiago's network had embedded themselves thoroughly into the organisation, and the entire staff body of the broadcast centre had been comprehensively neutralised in the half hour that preceded Demetri's arrival. Demetri didn't have the energy to ask exactly how that had been accomplished - and whether the staff would be waking up again - so instead he had just greeted Thiago and the masked Vardi Tayna at the edge of the site, and turned skywards to see the arrival of the Report's new director.

Enyakatho Imfazwe was a rebel commander from the Near North, a term the people from the Wastelands used with reckless abandon to refer, rather dismissively, to nearly anything that wasn't south of Bonita. He had long thick dreadlocks, an easy-going confidence, and an instinctive awareness of camera angles that had earned him a place as Demetri's Administer for the Report for the Kingdom in Exile, a role he seemed to relish. Unlike Uzohola and her family, Enyakatho's Saharan roots went much deeper into Illéan soil - he had been raised in Midston before joining the cause, and had traded in a pleasantly average life as a hard-working Six for an existence on the run with only his camera and his wits to keep him alive and useful.

He was, it was plain to see, absolutely thriving.

He jogged over to Demetri with a broad smile upon landing, and clapped Thiago on the back. Unlike the Crown's gaudily dressed presenters, Enyakatho preferred dull winter colours accentuated with a single point of colour. Today, it was a yellow rose pinned to his colour which had somehow managed to survive the parachute jump entirely unruffled."Well, gentlemen, are we ready to film ourselves a _masterpiece_?" He had a lilting accent that wasn't quite Cajun, but which gave even the most ordinary of his words a kind of exciting, adventurous quality. He gestured to his team, who were cutting themselves loose of their chutes. "The gang's all here, so let's get this Selection started. High command has picked out a great bunch of girls, really think this whole thing's gonna be great - which studio are we using, this one?" He gestured to the locked gate Demetri and the others had assembled around, and was answered with a short nod from Thiago. "We got a key, or...?"

"Vardi Tayna." In the dark, the roving lights lit up Demetri's dark green eyes, bounced back off the buttons on his coat, split into rainbows along each strand of his hair. "Go."

She didn't need to be told twice, but vanished into the gloom along the fence. Demetri counted his breaths - _one, two, three _\- and watched for any sign of encroaching Crown fences, and didn't think he had numbered more than two dozen exhales before the gates were swinging open to show Vardi Tayna standing behind it, her hands in her pockets, smiling very slightly and gesturing them in towards the broadcast center. She had blood on her finger, but when she caught Demetri looking, a silent question, she replied simply, "the barbed wire has to be fed." Another of the General's superstitions.

Into the studio they all darted - still a skeleton crew, just as their first Report had been, all the better to steal silently in and out of the enemy's television hub, two by two: techs, spies, announcers, and then Enyakatho, and then Demetri. From now on, Demetri thought, they could film most of their Reports from the winter palace in Sonage, but for this week's edition, for anything they wanted to deliberately put into the face of the royal family, they needed to hack into the palace's own broadcast of their own Report. Demetri couldn't deny he derived a little smug satisfaction from taking over the Crown's feed. Their mole inside the royal court had provided them with some sort of an encryption key to break into the broadcast, and as soon as they were into the empty studio, Enyakatho set his tech crew to accomplishing just that while Vardi Tayna and Thiago started hauling up lights and microphones to establish some semblance of professionalism, under the director's keen eye.

"No, we need to eliminate those shadows, bring the light back towards me... little bit to the left... perfect, perfect, stop right there. Where are the microphones for the announcers? Vardi Tayna, throw that wire for me over here."

The announcers were a small girl with her green hair styled into an elaborate green Mohawk perched on a high bar stool with her feet propped up on the bar, a microphone gripped tightly in a hand dripping with cheap brass rings, and a lanky guy with his hair in two braids, yawning and looking over his notes. They were both dressed casually, in long-sleeved t-shirts and ripped jeans, clearly with the intention of staying well out of the path of the cameras. They looked up at Demetri as he entered, and smiled, and chorused, "good evening, your Majesty!"

Demetri looked at Enyakatho . "They're _all _doing that now?"

_Your Majesty_ this, _your Highness_ that, _your Royal Splendour_ when Wick was feeling especially playful. Demetri found it all rather tiring. Was this what he had signed up for?

"They _absolutely _all are, your Majesty. Sit here for me, won't you? There's a bit of a glare... move left... right, sorted. Wren, Farid, you guys ready to go?"

They were ready to go. Demetri sank into the seat that Enyakatho had indicated, and caught sight of himself in the monitor. He looked... regal. His hair had been artfully tousled, Uzohola had lined his eyes with a tiny amount of kohl ("to make them _pop_, Dimi!"), his skin was bronzed by long exposure to the sun. His clothes had been chosen with a great deal of caution, and then forwarded up to high command for final approval. "Let's not make this too formal," had been Bernard Givre's words. "We're not the Crown, and we're not pretending to be." But they did have to look polished, so Demetri was clad in a blue fisherman's jumper with the collar of his shirt just peeking over the edge of the cable-knit. It made him look approachable, Enyakatho had enthused on first sight. It made him look real.

He was able to perfectly conceal his gun under it.

All very important characteristics of absolutely any garment.

"The rest of your life begins now, your Majesty!" Enyakatho spun the camera to face Demetri and checked the lighting. "All good? Vardi Tayna, what's the count?"

A bored-looking Vardi Tayna called, "six seconds, Enya."She was fixing a scope to her rifle, one foot propped up on the sill of the open window, overlooking the main gate of the broadcast centre's compound. If anyone ventured out to find out exactly who had taken over the communication hub, the first Demetri would hear about it would be the crack of a shot. When she caught Demetri looking at her, she stuck her tongue out at him, and thumbed off the safety. The General's gold ring still glittered on her middle finger.

"Six seconds? Ahead of schedule! We're really on top of things today, I _love_ it. Right. Demetri..."

Enyakatho straightened the camera and signalled Demetri, who broke out his polite broadcast smile a mere second before his image flickered up on all of the screens around them. A dozen Demetris smiled from every surface around the room, and said, in a low, even tone, "Good evening, Illéa. The day is here at last. I hope you are as excited as I am."

Thiago moved, a mere shadow between the ghostly glows of the monitor, his eyes taking it all in with a fervent focus. At his nod, Demetri continued. "My people, I wish to thank you for your support. The response we received to our announced Selection was nothing short of overwhelming. I am sure that there are thirty five beautiful queens among them, and it will be my honour to get to know these most brave and honourable Daughters of Illéa over the next few weeks." Enyakatho was signalling something, and Demetri laughed ruefully, a perfectly rehearsed sound that managed to seem as endearing as it was indulgent. "Well, then, I suppose there's no point beating around the bush, is there? Let's get on with what's important."

Enyakatho gestured his hand towards the nearest tech, and the monitors flashed a deep red with the seal of the rebellion.

Wren lifted her microphone. It was clear why she was chosen for this duty once she began to speak - she had a low, melodious voice without any discernable accent, crystal clear and perfectly pitched. "Lady Lissa Dove of occupied Angeles." A face appeared on the screen - a slender girl with doe-eyes and a mischevious half-smile, her hair a silvery white-gold awash in very pale light, nearly precisely the same colour as her skin. She reminded Demetri a little bit of Täj, just that first generally overwhelming impression of pale-on-pale-on-pale. Even her background seemed somewhat hoary and hazy, like she was standing in a field of white ash, like she had arranged for a backdrop of wintery mist just to perfect the image. Her eyes were a piercing blue, the only true blazing spot of colour in the entire photo. They seemed almost alive, those eyes, and Demetri privately thought that they were following him, even from the frozen tableau of the photograph.

The rebels didn't use castes, so Wren did not make any reference to the Selected girl's Crown-appointed category, but instead lowered her microphone and looked at Farid expectantly as Lady Lissa's photo faded from the screen and was replaced by the next. Demetri knew she was what the palace called an Eight. A homeless girl, a survivor, and if you looked closely, you could almost see it etched into her eyes. Thiago had called her an open book. Demetri thought he knew what the spymaster meant.

Farid smiled as he spoke. It gave his voice a soothing tone, like he was enjoying every word he spoke, tenor and smooth, like pouring caramel. It reminded one of the radio announcers from very old programs, like he had stolen his accent from some hapless commentator several decades ago. "Lady Yue Yukimura of Whites."

The girl whose image replaced Lissa's had golden skin with cool undertones, seeming to be almost lit from beneath by some sort of rich inner light. She had dark brown hair the colour of mahoghany, allowed to fall quite naturally in very loose, gentle waves. Her umber eyes were very dark and very steady, almost calming in their total serenity, and alight with that same inner glow. She had a refined, classical set of features set into a heart-shaped face: cupid bow lips, perfectly arched cheekbones, a dimple in her right cheek that made her look a little younger than her nineteen years. Her smile was absolutely mesmerising. Demetri had no doubt she would prove to be a favourite of many in the audience, for Lady Yue had represented Illéa quite masterfully at international skating events all over the world and was already something of a familiar face for people across the nation, rebel and citizen alike. Thiago had informed Demetri that her mother had been the first politician in Whites to switch allegiance over to the new rebel council governing the province, and her parents were both councillors at the provinicial level, key to ensuring the smooth transition of power from Crown to Kingdom in Exile when the time came for the coup. Demetri had no doubt that Devery Atiqtalaaq had played a very large role in winning Lady Yue her place in the Selection, but he couldn't exactly argue that the Northern Warden had chosen poorly.

"Lady Eden Lahela." Though this was officially the announcement of their names and identities for the first time, Demetri knew that any of the girls living in Crown territory would have already been extracted by one of Thiago's network, to ensure that the black widow queen could carry out no reprisals for their awful crime of joining the Kingdom in Exile's cause. With any luck, they should arrive at the safe-house by tomorrow evening. The girls in rebel territory - well, they could be allowed to celebrate for an evening. "Of occupied Fennley."

Lady Eden was not one of those girls in rebel territory. Her mother was one of the most valued propagandists at the queen's disposal, the editor of a pro-Crown newspaper that boasted a readership of nearly one third the Illéan population. The printing heiress had burnished olive skin and hair like so much spilled newsprint ink. Her downturned almond eyes were such a dark brown as to seem almost black from this distance; she had thick charcoal eyelashes and thick brows that seemed to give her an implacably sardonic expression. She had drawn her hair back and woven it into two perfect braids, from which absolutely no stray strand escaped. She had her head tilted, as though she was challenging the photographer in some silent provocative way; in the warm orange light, her tiny collection of freckles on the highest points of her cheeks resembled a constellations of stars scattered randomly across her skin like so many dice. There was a softness to her that Demetri thought was probably very misleading. He wondered what her mother's newspaper would make of this greatest of betrayals.

Again, to Farid. "Lady Vardi Tayna of Dominica." Vardi Tayna had spun around in her chair by the window, and fired finger guns in Demetri's direction, like she was trying to make him laugh as her picture appeared. And there was Vardi Tayna's photograph, taken at the Selection safe-house some unseasonably warm morning earlier that week, her eyes still heavily lidded with sleep. None of the rebels could pose for a picture to save their lives, so it had rapidly devolved into a session of throwing the camera from person to person and snapping a candid of whoever was nearest you before they could notice what was going on. Demetri was sure that was how they had captured this image of Vardi Tayna - there was a vibrancy to the way her hair fell, a dark warmth to her eyes, a light to her smile as she laughed at something someone had said, just off camera. Demetri thought it must have been Täj, so unguarded the expression on Vardi Tayna's face. She looked beautiful. Approachable. Sweet.

In other words, she looked absolutely nothing like herself.

In the upper right-hand corner of the screen, they had placed a small box with Demetri's face, to capture his reactions as each girls flashed across the monitor. Of course, he had become well-acquainted with these girls on paper throughout the week, so it became at once a mere exercise in acting out as many expressions of contemplation, approval, and curiosity as he was capable. Wren's turn again. "Lady Corvina Rouen of Sonage."

Ah. Demetri subtly flicked his gaze over to Thiago, to gauge the spymaster's reaction. Corvina was... interesting. Demetri knew that this unassuming girl had caused Thiago and his little birds a great deal of frustration over the years, and wondered who exactly on high command had decided to overrule Wesick's protestations to approve Lady Corvina's admission to the Selection. Her almond eyes seemed relatively innocent, her bee-stung lips carnelian and slightly parted. Her hair was rich and dark, the sort of colour Täj would call eigengrau, just the total absence of colour, styled into an effortlessly rogueish semblance of dishevelment. Every line of her body seemed to radiate barely concealed intensity, a vibrant charisma piercingly apparent even filtered through the medium of the glossy screen.

Purely to irritate Thiago, Demetri made sure to smile broadly when he saw her.

"Lady Marjorie Vermudez." As Farid spoke, Demetri realised that he could see each photo ticking across the screen reflected plainly in Vardi Tayna's dark eyes. What was she thinking about her competition? Was she taking this seriously as a competition? As though he had spoken aloud, she tilted her head over to him, met his gaze, and whispered without sound: "_pretty girls_".

Pretty girls indeed. Lady Marjorie was hardly any exception. Her green-hazel eyes were keen and inquisitive, her hair a resplendent mass of gentle russet curls. She had strong features - a firm jaw, a blunt chin, a turned-up nose, thick coal-coloured brows and thick dark rose lips - and perfectly smooth brown skin with the exception of a single prominent beauty mark in the hollow between her zygomatic and her maxilla. She had an intent, curious gaze and a stubborn set to her mouth that made her look fiercely determined. Thiago hadn't turned up much about her - Lady Marjorie did not seem like the sort of person who led a very interesting life - but there was something about the resolve in her eyes that made Demetri think that state of affairs was likely to be very short-lived indeed.

And then, very abruptly, the screen cut out. The room was plunged into total gloom. In the darkness, Demetri's voice: "Are we...?"

"One moment, your Highness." Enyakatho shouted something in Spanish to the tech team. After only a few seconds, the screens flashed with bright white light, illuminating Enyakatho's broad smile, as the propagandist nodded sharply and turned back to his new king. "We're back. We've got maybe fifteen minutes more before they cut us off for good." He threw a look at his team. "Let's get through these a little faster, shall we? Vardi Tayna, keep your finger on the trigger."

She didn't need to be told twice.

"How many more?" Demetri adjusted his cuffs.

"About thirty, your Majesty, if you think you can survive that long. Right, let's continue with Yukon next..." The announcers flicked through their notes to find the right girl and nodded solemnly. "Farid, let's kick off with you this time. Demetri..._game face_."

Demetri smiled warmly, the red light flashed, and the cameras rolled for a second time.

* * *

Field Marshal Uzokuwa was broad-faced and affable, his head clean-shaven and a thick beard covering most of a large, twisted scar along his jawline. He kept up a constant idle chatter as the world melted by outside, but to Marjorie's intense disapproval, he spoke nothing of importance - just talking about the weather, the birds outside, the paltry lunch they'd shared on the side of the road and had they watched the new season of _Diadem_?

Marjorie was glad that one of the other girls asked for her. It was collected, self-sure Lady Eden who leaned forward in her seat, a slight smile turning up her lips, and said, slightly fascinated, "Really? You guys watch _Diadem_?" _Diadem_was a cute television show dramatising with some glee the Selection of King Marcus, from a few hundred years ago, all glossy and sumptuous, with the kind of richly designed costuming and intricately designed sets that made the actual storytelling more of an afterthought. Everyone already knew who would win, anyway, Marjorie thought. People didn't watch it to see who would win, they watched it to see beautiful actors and gorgeous actresses get into various outlandish scenarios which would necessitate a grand and tearful confession of love in the palace ballroom or lead to an overacted argument in front of the entire royal court that ended with someone getting slapped. It was a national phenomenon. Summer, Marjorie's best friend at home in Claremont, had never missed an episode.

Privately, Marjorie thought the royals had ordered its incessant broadcast to try in vain to compete with the rebel Selection for the hungry eyes of the national audience. The two Reports that had elapsed since the rebel Selection had been announced had been restrained and demure. Prince Mordred had not said anything about his supposed brother's search for a wife, but had spoken about a Swendway delegation that had agreed to a great new trade deal, discussed the increased rates of university attendance in the east, offered a few thoughts on renovation works being done in the Capital. Queen Regent Ysabel had looked pale and tired and _angry _the entire time, but she had managed to refrain from actually saying anything. The entire set rippled with constant tension, from the very first flourish of the national anthem to the very last moment focused on the palace's seal.

The royal family must have realised that this was a bad look for them, because the government channels had been packed to the brim with pro-Crown rhetoric for the rest of the week: reruns of old Selections filled with gorgeous young ladies resplendent in silk with the perfect manners of queens-to-be, documentaries about the good works of the dead King Trajan which all ended with a vehement condemnation of his death at the hands of the abhorrent rebels, music videos set in Angeles featuring transcendentally beguiling models walking around crystal wrought skyscrapers and exploring the varicoloured, flowerstrewn gardens of the royal palace. And, of course, _Diadem. _Almost like the Crown wanted the country to know what a _real_Selection ought to look like.

They were transparently setting the rebels up to fail, and yet -

"Are you kidding me? I _love _that show. But I'm still a few episodes behind," Uzokuwa confided cheerfully, as their truck hit a pothole and the entire vehicle shuddered like it was about to come apart at the seams. Lady Yue and Lady Eden nearly cracked their heads against one another as the truck jerked right to skirt what might have been a landmine. Was it a landmine? God, Marjorie hoped it wasn't a landmine. "So please, no spoilers!" The truck abruptly veered left and skidded down a low slope, and Marjorie could not help but notice that her knuckles had gone white from holding on to her seatbelt so tightly. "If there's one thing that might lose you the Selection," Uzokuwa continued, totally unfazed. "It's spoiling that show. I can't wait - we've agreed that my sister owes me a bottle of whiskey if Lady Vesper wins in the end."

(She wouldn't. History told them that King Marcus had married Lady Esther of St. George. Lady Vesper had actually been eliminated just before entering the Elite, as punishment for ripping up another girl's dress in a blatant act of sabotage. No one in the truck seemed to have the heart to tell Uzokuwa any of this)

It was a small detail, but Marjorie itched to write it down anyway. So they had leisure time to watch television. So they received Crown broadcasts. So they dealt in alcohol - she knew that the settled northern provinces had their own rebel currency, but did the ground forces eschew it in favor of barter and bargain? "What sort of whiskey?" she asked. Her tone was light, bouncy - she didn't think anyone could pick up that she was trying to probe into whether they had the facility to brew their own, or still relied on Illéan's distilleries to produce their liquor. It was natural to be curious, she told herself. That would help her a great deal. Any questions could be excused as normal human curiosity, ordinary inquisitivity about a world that for so long she had glimpsed only briefly on news reports and the front pages of newspapers.

She was to be disappointed. Uzokuwa's smile didn't even flicker. "It's a Saharan brand," he replied cheerfully, peering out the window. Despite the violent motion of the vehicle, Field Marshal Uzokuwa was utterly still, even as the Selected girls were thrown from side to side. "Our dad used to drink it when we lived in Omdurman... ah, we're nearly there!"

Marjorie turned her head slightly to follow his gaze, her curiosity piqued. The Wastelands were just a wide expanse of scrubland and desert, with broad stretches of bare rock and sand defying the encroach of any shadows searching for relief from the harsh glare of the unyielding sun, set high above them in a sky the clear blue colour of mertensia. So arid and desolate the land, absolutely anything that was not hewn rock stood out a mile, as much as it could stand out without actually being on fire in the moment. So it was very clear to Marjorie, when she looked out the window, that their destination was probably the large building to the south-east, framed flawlessly by the rising sun.

"It's not much," Uzokuwa conceded. "But, you know, it'll do."

Lady Eden said, quite sharply, "how long will we be here for?"

Uzokuwa smiled. "Even if I knew," he said. "I still wouldn't tell you."

The brakes of the truck protested loudly as they pulled to a stop. Someone, Marjorie was deeply amused to see, had put up a white picket fence around the tall, narrow building, like they were dividing the desert that was the garden from the desert that was the Wasteland, though there seemed to be no discernable difference between the two - certainly not even the vainest attempts at cultivation. There was a tall, pale man smoking a cigarette on the other side of the fence, scuffing the red soil with the heel of his shoe, who looked up at the truck only when Uzokuwa pushed open the door, though Marjorie was sure that he would have to be deaf not to have heard them approaching from about a mile away. He had very pale eyes, that man, but that was all that Marjorie had time to think because there was a sudden flurry of motion as Uzokuwa bounded from the truck. Uzokuwa stretched his arms until he heard a joint pop, and only then nodded and smiled and gestured for the Selected girls to scramble out of the truck and join him in looking up at the first safe-house.

"As I said," the field marshal said apologetically. "Not much." And then Lady Yue jumped as he abruptly let out a loud, sharp bark: "_iphi inkosi yami? Ukohola_!"

The door to the tall, narrow building swung open, and a rebel walked out. Unlike the rebels that had ferried Marjorie and the other girls across the country, who had universally been clad in camo and khaki, this woman was wearing a long red cardigan and a colourful floral skirt that fell to the floor and sent up little dervishes of sand as she walked over to the assembly of Lady Yue, Lady Eden, and Marjorie, a small smile on her face as she addressed her fellow freedom fighter. "_Ai, ai, ai, yeka ukumemeza_."She and Field Marshal Uzokuwa looked like mirror images of each other - the same big brown eyes, the same sharp jaws, the same rich dark skin. This must have been the sister he had mentioned. Revolution was clearly the family business. "No need to shout, Field Marshal. We hear you, loud and clear." She was a little sharper than her brother, a little thinner and taller, but they had the same smile, perfect white against their ebony skin. "It's so lovely to meet you girls. I've heard so much talk about you these past few weeks, I half-imagine I know you already." She extended a hand. Although her fingers were long and slender, her palms were craggy with callouses, the tips of her fingers worn by exposure to the element, tiny scars along her wrists marking what might have been the legacy of handcuffs.

Even this elegant woman had made and suffered her share of violent chaos. Marjorie had known that this was a rebel Selection, but exactly what those two elementary words meant when they were forced together was slowly beginning to make a little more sense. Lady Eden was the first to shake the woman's hand, a firm, sharp movement that suggested the young heiress was coming to the same realisation as Marjorie herself. Lady Yue was next, her motions so dainty Marjorie was half-afraid that the sun would cause her to dissipate like so much mist, offering the woman a sweet little smile, and finally it was Marjorie's turn.

"Lady Eden Lahela, Lady Yue Yukimura." The woman said each name in turn as she greeted them. "Lady Marjorie Vermudez... You are all very, very welcome. My name is Uzohola Ndlovukazi, and I suppose you can consider me a sort of co-ordinator for this Selection. You've already met my brother - I hope he ensured your journey was smooth."

"It was perfect," Lady Yue said. Lady Eden and Marjorie both made vague sounds of agreement - Eden was watching Uzohola very closely, like she was trying to look beyond the woman's skin into her very bones, and Marjorie was assessing her surroundings as subtly as she was able to do so, noting exactly how barren it all was. No wonder they hadn't been given many restrictions in their original briefings, she thought wryly. Usually the Selections came with a long list of what you could and could not do while staying at the palace, but here... well, Marjorie mused, looking at the horizon, you wouldn't get very far here even if you tried to make a run for it.

"I'm so glad." Uzohola nodded. "Your things have already been placed into your rooms, so I'll bring you upstairs and let you three settle in to your rooms."

Marjorie, her brow creased, began to speak: "Ms Nidu...Ms Ndlu... Ms Ndlova..."

"Please, call me Uzohola. God knows most of them don't even try with the surname anymore. Now, let's get you out of this heat." She waved dismissively at her brother. "_Uhambe ngokuphepha_, Uzokuwa, travel safe. I'll take things from here."

The field marshal did not argue any further."Really great chatting to you, ladies. I'm head of the security detail, so I'm sure I'll see you all around, but best of luck with your first few days." Uzokuwa's scar did little to dull the brilliance of his smile. "Tell his Highness I sent my regards," he added to his sister, who inclined her head in answer. Uzokuwa jumped back into the truck and was away in a massive cloud of dust.

Marjorie finally got to finish her question: "is the king staying here as well?"

It seemed like such a small, cramped space, nothing like the palatial space of the Angeles palace. How could they possibly maintain a respectable distance from the royalty if they were all living on top of one another in this manner?

She wasn't sure if Uzohola genuinely hadn't heard her, or was just feigning deafness, but in any case, the Fennley girl wasn't given an answer, because their co-ordinator was already across the arid little patch of garden and pushing the door open to usher Lady Yue and Lady Eden inside, and it was up to Marjorie to trail after them, her dark green eyes flitting this way and that to take it all in. You only got one first impression of a place, after all.

The pale man was still calmly considering his cigarette by the fence, watching Uzokuwa's convoy disappear back across the edge of the world. The scent of smoke was so strong, it was enough to momentarily quell Marjorie's intense curiosity about every element of the rebellion, and drive her indoors in the wake of the others, where Uzohola was giving a very brief account of the space they were to share together; Marjorie arrived just in time to catch the basics: five girls to a floor, shared amenities on the first floor, and the run of the garden. She almost rolled her eyes at that last part. How generous of them.

Lady Eden had been assigned to the sixth floor, just one below Lady Yue and Marjorie's rooms on the top floor, over-looking the ruined town about a half-mile away, the only interruption in the great expanse of desert that continued unabated for as far as anyone could see. "This is just one of many safe-houses," Uzohola added, as she pointed out Lady Eden's room. "So don't get too comfortable. We could be gone in the morning."

Lady Eden didn't look too amused at this news. How wonderfully welcome they were being made to feel. "Got it," she said. "Thank you, Ms Ndlovukazi."

Marjorie's room was precisely above Eden's - Yue's was a little further down the hall, tucked into a corner beside a bedroom with a closed door, through which they could nonetheless faintly hear a vinyl record playing, scratchy and bassy: _y__ou shake my nerves and you rattle my brain, too much love drives a man insane_...

"Not a fan of Jerry Lee Lewis?" Uzohola said amusedly, when she saw that Marjorie was frowning. "Bit of an acquired taste, I'll concede... this is yours, Lady Marjorie."

The room was small. Some might have said cramped, but Marjorie would not have argued with the designation cozy, with a low bed tucked into one corner under a low-hanging sloped ceiling, a quilted blanket folded carefully at its foot, her bags sitting on a wooden trunk that had been pushed over to stand by the window seat. There was a small armoire, a thick red Oriental mat covering up old varnish floorboards, a short, spindly dressing-table beside the door with its mirror marred by a single long crack running diagonally across its face. There was a small shelf running above the bed with a few well-thumbed paperbacks sitting on it, to which Uzohola gestured. "We know we asked you to pack lightly. King Demetri was concerned you might not have been able to bring things with which to amuse yourselves when you're bored, so he hand-selected a few books for each of you, that he thought you might like. If any of them aren't to your liking, then please do let us know and we can arrange to pick you up something more to your taste the next time we're in town."

Yue put her hands over her mouth. She didn't need to say how touched the small gesture made her feel - Marjorie could see it in her eyes.

"That's very good of King Demetri," Marjorie said now. She didn't want to look at the books in front of the co-ordinator, lest her expression betray that they were entirely unsuited to her own taste, but thankfully Uzohola seemed to recognise that she was about to overstay her welcome. "Lady Yue, I'll bring you to your room next. I'll call you when it's time for dinner - please do relax in the meantime." The Saharan woman and the Whites girl departed quietly, and Marjorie was glad to shut her door after them and be left, for the first time in two weeks, to the blessed calm of her own thoughts.

And, well, she certainly had a lot to think about.

But _first__._...

Marjorie pulled her notepad from her bag and immediately sat down to the vanity to scrawl down every detail that still remained fresh and vivid in her mind, from her departure from her family home early yesterday morning - her mother had not cried, but her stepmother had; her father had hugged her so tightly that she thought her bones might crack - to her overnight stay in a safe-house on the Paloman border - well into rebel territory, in the penthouse an opulent hotel that had once charged five figures for a single night's stay, but was now being opened up as emergency housing for those few people who still had not found permanent homes following the rebellion's victory in the province - to their long, boring journey from Paloma and then down, through Bonita, well into the Wastelands, past the edge of what was marked on any map Marjorie had ever seen in Illéa. She couldn't say that it had been a particularly gruelling or arduous journey, and certainly talking to Uzokuwa, while not particularly enlightening, had given her a clear-eyed glimpse into what normal life looked like for the foot-soldiers of the rebellion, even if that wasn't precisely the topic that interested Marjorie most. Nonetheless, every detail was precious, and Marjorie threw them all onto the page before her memory could even consider betraying her.

The important question, and the one she had written on the top of the page across which she now scrawled:_is this the real Demetri Dunin?_

And below that, just as urgent a question:

_Does it matter if it isn't?_

* * *

Somewhere, beyond the edge of the world, a dog was barking.

What a foreign world this was, compared to the cold serenity of Whites - more like a tableau from satellite images of Mars, than somewhere on the same continent as home. The land was pockmarked with deep scores of bare slate and broad sheets of arid red soil, unmarred by vegetation or signs of life. Yue found herself gazing out the window in abject fascination at the scene beyond. The ghost town along whose threshold the safe-house was straddled was a collection of gutted buildings and the carcasses of what may have once been prosperous business, all disembowelled and hollow.

She was broken from her thoughts by a voice by the door. "I'll leave you to settle in," Uzohola said with a smile, an expression Yue returned almost immediately with a quick nod and a sweet smile. She couldn't say she had gleaned much about the older girl, but she thought Uzohola seemed on the whole a friendly person, and after so many hours entirely surrounded by grim-faced military men and fox-eyed spies with knives on their belts, it was a lovely relief to be greeted with a warm smile and the promise of hot food later in the day.

"Thank you so much," Yue replied politely. As soon as the co-ordinator had departed, Yue could not hold herself back from darting over to the bed to see what books the king had left her on the shelf. They werre not extraordinarily inspired choices, but they suited Yue so perfectly that it didn't matter very much whether they had been selected at random or whether, as Uzohola had suggested, the king had pored over each choice to tailor it to her personally. Here, on the top of the pile, was a copy of Anna Karenina with a torn cover page, like a book that had been adored to the point of physical destruction, sitting atop an ancient edition of _Sense and Sensibility_ with thoroughly dog-earred corners, stacked in turn on top of a biography of Isolde Bisset, who had been Illéa's most successful ice-skater for over two dozen years.

Until Yue herself, that was.

Yue hugged _Anna Karenina _to her chest as she sank down onto the bed, running the nail of her thumb along her lower lip, barely managing to keep the smile off her face. Deep breaths, she thought, deep breaths. This was the beginning of the Selection. Only the beginning. Nothing worth celebrating just yet. And yet she _had _lasted this long. That had to count for something, didn't it? That had to _matter_.

And even if the king seemed to be a total non-entity thus far, she thought ruefully, she'd at least earned a few new paperbacks out of the deal.

The music was still pouring in through the wall, very softly: _young girls are coming to the canyon, and in the mornings, I can see them walking__._... The walls in this place had to be paper-thin, Yue thought. There would be no chances of keeping any secrets here. At least this way she would probably have to go out of her way to avoid making friends. Indeed, she could hear the low tone of someone speaking outside the door, and a slight laugh. Constant noise, constant company, never having a moment of peace to herself... Yue was sure it would sound like torture to some others, but after the pristine serenity of home in Whites, she didn't think it sounded like such a bad arrangement for however long she lasted here.

She ran her fingers along the spine of the book, like she was reassuring herself that it was indeed real and solid and _there_, and then jumped as there was a sharp knock at the door. "Y-yes?"

Her door swung open very slowly, almost lazily, to reveal another girl standing in the hallway, clearly newly arrived, and clearly of some New Asian extrication like Yue herself, with long dark hair arranged into gentle waves and intense dark eyes that made Yue feel a litte less secure for having been caught in their path. She was _vibrant_, this girl, colourful in a way people seemed to be in a south, full of the vitality that the far north seemed to leach from its citizens given enough time. "Hey, neighbour." Her smile was wicked, and yet somehow it drew you in, made you want to deserve the expression. "Just wanted to have a quick look-in, see what was what, you know? You're Yue?"

Yue nodded. She had memorised the other Selected girls, a practise which had begun as a therapeutic exercise to calm her down when the idea of travelling into an active war-zone had seemed like a fate so much worse than death. It was no more difficult than learning the order in which she was expected to string together all the moves in an ice-skating routine, Yue thought, and it had been almost a fun exercise to look for friendly faces, girls who might let her stand in their shadows during group events and ensure she wasn't made a target by being separated out on her own. It had been interesting, she thought, to see what choices the rebellion had made, what traits it seemed they had valued the most in choosing the shortlist for their new Queen in Exile, how little they seemed to value castes, quite true to their word. She very much doubted a traditional Selection would have admitted so many Sevens and Eights.

This girl, for example, was a Six on paper, though she carried herself like one of a much higher caste. Corvina Rouen, Yue thought. Sonage. She had looked so much taller in her photo on the Report, Yue was surprised to reaise she was only an inch or so taller than Yue herself - or she would be, if she was wearing flats. She held herself like a girl who was much taller. And she was dressed nicely. They had been told the rebels probably couldn't provide most of their clothes, as the palace would have, but Yue hadn't realised that people would dress so _nicely_ for the rebel Selection. Her own clothes were obviously of a more expensive sort - the sort of perk that came from a family which knew how to weather political turmoil with fortunes intact - but they were simple, just a tartan skirt and a warm red sweater unsuited to the current climate, whereas Corvina Rouen rather looked like... well, Yue wasn't entirely sure - she was wearing a grey blazer and grey shorts, and thin black tights, and a collared black shirt that might have been made of silk, and high-heeled boots that made her look tall and...

And her smile was utterly magnetic. Much like Demetri's, Yue thought shyly, it made you want to see it again - in Demetri's case, to have it directed you and at no one else. In Corvina Rouen's case, to win the approval of the person it belonged to.

"I'm Yue,"she agreed. "You're Lady Corvina?"

"You can call me Cor, if you prefer."There was something detached about the way that she said it, like she had made up her mind at the beginning of this conversation to make that offer no matter which way this conversation ended up going.

"Oh. Okay." Cor.

Corvina stepped a little further into the room, and glanced about with that same slight smile turning the corner of her lips. "Anyway. I won't bother you for much longer. Just wanted to introduce myself." She gestured across the hallway. "I imagine we'll get to know one another quite well, whether we want to or not."

Yue nodded. What else could she say?

Corvina looked at her. Her smile showed off her cuspids, Yue thought, and that made it look somehow sharper than most, like she could slit your throat with a single smirk. It was an image that passed through Yue's mind very quickly, there and gone again, but she could not say that it didn't leave an impression. The other girl inclined her head towards the partition between Yue and the next room over, through which the music was still echoing very faintly. "I imagine that'll get old very quickly."

"I don't mind it," Yue said.

Corvina arched an eyebrow and shrugged. Had this whole conversation just been an attempt to scope Yue out, the smaller girl wondered, or a genuine attempt to forge some kind of bond with another human being equally adrift in this huge chaotic event? All hints pointed to the former rather than the latter, but Yue wasn't afraid to hope. "Rather you than me," was all that Corvina said as she stepped back into the hallway, slipping her hands into her pocket with a magnanimous expression, and seemed about to say something in parting when she paused and cocked her head, such a bird-like gesture of curiosity Yue could not hold back from going over to the door to see what she was looking at.

_What _was a _who_. It was the pale man who had been outside the safe-house when Yue and Eden and Marjorie had arrived. He was leaning against the wall, just opposite the room with all the music, watching the door like it was a movie. Now that she was paying more attention to him, Yue could see that he was handsome in a hollow, delicate sort of way, complicated a little bit further by just how precisely blue his eyes were, like water trapped beneath ice on an open river. She hadn't ever seen a hungry sort of beauty before, but she thought that was probably the best way to describe it. Her first impression had probably been negatively coloured by the simple disappointing fact of his not being Demetri - that was silly, because most people weren't - and diluted further by his clear disinterest in the existence and presence of the Selected girls. He wasn't doing much to dispel that idea now, because he said nothing, even Uzohola appeared at the top of the stairs, just beside him.

"We'll be having dinner in about an hour, if that suits you girls." Her tone suggested that it wouldn't matter very much if it didn't. "I don't think his Majesty will be joining us, but just in case, you might want to smarten up a little bit."

Yue hadn't realised that Lady Marjorie had cracked open her door as well until the other girl spoke. "In an hour? Where should we gather?"

Uzohola glanced at the pale man. "Where are they setting up?"

His voice was low and even, with an accent similar to Demetri's - if it belonged to any of the provinces, it was Angeles, but it owed a lot more to the Wastelands than to the capitol. The pale man said, quite simply, "garden", and Uzohola beamed.

"Awesome! We'll be having a barbecue tonight. Come outside whenever you're ready, and we'll take a quick group photo before we eat."

A screen flashed at her hip, and she grabbed up the device she had clipped to her belt to squint at the words scrolling across its face with a slight scowl.

"Oh, for the love of... Okay, ladies, don't be late." And with that, she vanished back down the stairs, leaving the pale man looking slightly amused at her abrupt disappearance, and totally unconcerned at the reasons behind it. He just said to the assembled girls, "Punctuality recommended." He paused. "For your own good."

Marjorie gestured at the closed door through which the music continued to pound, unabated. "Should we tell her?"

The pale man's lips quirked into the ghost of what might have been a smile. "She's competition," he said simply, and then he too was gone, following Uzohola back down the stairs. If Yue really strained she could make out a few words - _delay, Tammins, bomb_ \- and the general cadence of the conversation - Uzohola's voice a little more strident, annoyed rather than upset; the pale man's, rather flat, almost calming - but truth be told, that only conjured up yet more questions about what was going on.

Marjorie's door slammed shut again. Although it was only she and Yue left in the hallway, Corvina's voice was silk-soft. "Who's _he_?"

_Off limits_, Yue thought, but she did not dare to say so. "A guard?"

"He's not a guard," Corvina Rouen said confidently. Yue didn't know how she did it. She seemed thoughtful for a split second and then shook her head like she was physically dispelling a web of thoughts. "Alright." She gave Yue a little wave. "I guess I'll see you at dinner."

"I'll see you at dinner," Yue agreed, and watched the door shut across the hallway.

Dinner.

Their first glimpse of Demetri?

Well, there was only way to find out.

Somewhere, beyond the edge of the world, the dog had finally ceased to bark.

* * *

**And the Selection has begun! I am so excited to really start to get into the meat of this story, and I really hope you are enjoying it so far. Please do let me know what you thought - I really loved reading all your reviews and PMs, thank you so so much!** **I really appreciate absolutely any and all feedback you can give me. Do you have a favourite Selected girl yet? Any front-runners standing out? No idea or theory is too small!**

**There are still loads of spots open in the Selection! Again, the deadline is next Sunday. If you have any questions, my inbox is always open!**

**Viewpoint characters in this chapter were _Marjorie Vermudez _by Michelle the Editor and _Yue Yukimura _by wolfofstark.**

**Thanks so much. I hope you enjoyed!**

**\- Izar**


	5. Between Starshine And Clay

**Chapter Five: Between Starshine And Clay**

* * *

_Come celebrate with me that everyday_  
_something has tried to kill me and has failed._

\- Lucille Clifton

* * *

Their newly crowned king was asleep on a low camp bed in the corner of the infirmary tent when Täj arrived. It did not look like a sound sleep. Demetri's face was badly bruised from where it had met the ground at a high speed and unforgiving angle; he had a swollen lip that threatened to burst and a set of delicately tiny stitches beside one eye, now thoroughy blackened in waning shades of ochre and purple. His left hand had been bandaged, his wrist strapped - it wasn't immediately apparent whether he had broken it punching someone, or being punched.

Even asleep, Demetri managed to look stressed.

Well, maybe he wasn't asleep, for as Täj approached, Demetri turned his head and through the narrowing crack of his swollen eye there was a flash of deep green as he watched the other rebel approach. His mouth twitched like he wanted to smile, but the expression would be too painful. He said, "so I have to get thrown out of a moving vehicle before you'll visit?" and Täj could not hold back a grin and a shrug.

"If you die," Täj said. "There's an open position."

Demetri didn't seem to find that very funny.

Täj settled gingerly onto the edge of Demetri's bed and produced a cigarette from his jacket, flipping his lighter between his fingers as he lit it, ignoring Demetri's one-eyed look of disapproval. So long at one another's shoulders, and the King of Ashes still transparently disagreed with Täj's chain-smoking like he thought his disapproval would put any kind of dent into the habit. "It relieves stress," the pale man muttered darkly, offering his king the pack with one arched eyebrow.

"Täj. Of _all_ people." Each word seemed to take a Herculean effort, but Demetri was not one to let that stop him. "What do you have." A deep breath. "To be _stressed_ about?"

Täj shook his head and feigned that he was too traumatised to offer an explanation and Demetri managed to shudder out a laugh, though it seemed to hurt his entire body to do so.

"The _Selection_?"

They knew each other too well. Täj shook his head and said, quite solemnly, "you haven't met them." He put his cigarette to his mouth. "You don't _know_."

"Have _you_?" Not even Demetri could hold back the curiosity in his voice, though he clearly wanted to seem a little above it all. That lone green eye did not leave Täj. If there was anyone Demetri would feel comfortable peppering with questions, it would be the pale rebel, but for his part, Täj did not seem entirely enthusiastic about discussing Demetri's search for a queen. "Met them?"

Täj's lip curled in amusement. "_Very_ reluctantly." He took a long drag, as Demetri leaned forward with his intact hand and pulled a cigarette from the pack. "Let's just hope they're not shallow." He gestured to Demetri's face, or what had once been a face, and the Lost King hacked out another short-lived laugh.

"Let's hope." He collapsed back against the pillows, and winced, reaching with his right hand to gently hold his side like he was trying to hold the bones together. "It looks much worse than it is."

"It looks pretty bad." Täj tossed him the lighter and exhaled pale grey smoke across the otherwise empty tent, tendrils of charcoal mist ghosting across abandoned beds and bloody bandages strewn here and there. They may be running a rebellion, but the king still got his own tent. It wouldn't have surprised Täj if the other invalids and convalescents had been evacuated hastily from the area when Demetri was brought in. All the better to keep their king's injuries a closely guarded secret. They needed to keep it a secret, because - "how did they know?"

Demetri's movements had been kept a total secret. Even Wick and Uzohola hadn't been told which path through the contested territories had been chosen for the young king's escape into the Wastelands to join the Selection. Even Täj had not known the precise details of Demetri's plans. Even Vardi Tayna had been kept in the dark about every aspect of the king's schedule, as one of the Selected ought to be. And yet there had been a set of landmines, a man with an rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and a small company of Crown forces waiting for them outside a town in Atlin, concealed in the foothills over what had once been Fort St James. Demetri had survived the car crash and the firefight that had ensued. Many of his companions had not. He still wore their blood under his nails.

"You know."

Täj's eyebrow raised, very slowly. "Compromised?" Sometimes he wondered whether even Demetri knew who their man in the royal court was, so closely guarded the secret. That knowledge belonged to Vardi Tayna, to Thiago, and to the high command alone. But if Demetri did not know, he did a marvellous job of concealing that lack of knowledge. That, Täj was starting to think, was probably the real sign of a good king - when you didn't know, acting the hell out of the idea that you did.

Demetri was clearly doing just that now. "Compromised," he agreed slowly, setting the cigarette between his teeth, his movements slow and stiff. High command would be fuming at the victory Angeles had scored by so badly wounding the face of the rebellion in this way, particularly just as his Selection was about to begin. Oh, it was still clear that Demetri was a good-looking guy, but the wounds on his face made him look slightly savage, almost feral. "Or..."

He didn't need to finish that sentence. Täj understood. Either their mole in the court had been compromised, or the court had achieved in slipping a mole into _their_ ranks. Double agents stacked on double agents, spy following spy, a tangled web of stolen information stolen back. Well, Thiago would ferret them out. The older spymaster was tenacious when it came to these sort of things, Täj thought amusedly, and enormously prideful about their results. It was a large part of the reason they had to make sure to try and keep Wesick and Rouen separated during this Selection - Thiago had a strange, resentful fascination with those who managed to thwart him, and unlike Vardi Tayna, who had been the last girl to earn his ire in this manner, Täj thought Corvina Rouen a very unlikely candidate for becoming one of Thiago's little birds

She had too many of her own ideas for that.

"Or," Täj agreed, and took another long drag, shaking his head as he did so. Well, he thought grimly, at least it was Demetri who would have to deal with all of this nonsense. There were few better suited to it.

Demetri exhaled and pulled the cigarette away, making a face - "Vardi Tayna got you these from that Danish place in Angeles, didn't she, they're _vile_" - and then could not hold back a cough that shook his shoulders and clearly hurt the two cracked ribs he had sustained in the initial vehicle collision. When he caught Täj looking, he waved the tab in the other young man's direction and said, "don't tell the doctor."

Täj's smile was very faint. "Fifteen years and you still think I'd snitch on you?"

"Can't be too careful, my friend." There was a warmth in his words. Demetri set his shoulders, and, feigning a casual disinterest, said, "what do you make of them? The Selected, I mean."

Täj rolled the cigarette between his fingers. "How long do you have?"

And Demetri rolled his eyes. "Well," he said teasingly. "At least I know my Lancelot won't try to make off with my Guinevere this time around."

"You think us the Round Table," Täj said thoughtfully. He didn't think that comparison _entirely_ tracked, and he latched on the opportunity to change the subject from one that was a little more tender for them both. "Reckon we're more like... the Fianna."

"The Fianna?" Demetri frowned. "Then I shall be Fionn, and you shall take care you are not Diarmuid. Does that work better?" He shook his head tiredly. "You're always a contrary one, aren't you?"

Täj grinned lazily. "You love it."

Demetri didn't seem to agree. "_As I was saying._ What do you make of them?"

Täj shrugged uncomfortably. Even with one of his oldest friends, he didn't like to air his opinions too loudly or too openly, especially when Demetri's marriage might hinge on the same. "Why don't you ask Uzohola?"

"You know why." Demetri shook his head ruefully. "I... trust you." There weren't many people he could say that about. There weren't many people for whom Täj would travel so far and so suddenly, just to sit at the end of their bed and share cigarettes. There weren't many people who had shared what they had. "Blood brothers, and all that."

Täj looked like this answer displeased him very much, for it suggested a set of expectations he could not possibly hope to satisfy. "They're fine," he said simply. "You know. Bland enough. Nice girls. I don't know what you expect me to say."

Demetri rolled his eyes. "Corvina Rouen, scion of Pandora, is not bland. Yue Yukimura, world-famous ice-skater, is not bland. Lissa Dove, leader of the outsiders, could not possibly be _bland_."

"I don't know what you expect me to say," Täj said again. "They must be on their best behaviour, because I'm not entirely sure I could tell you which ones are which."

"_That_ I do not believe." Demetri was correct, even if the other man hated that he was. Täj was so quiet, so watchful, so paranoid, that not much escaped his gaze and notice, or indeed eluded his memory. He was an observant one, their Täj, and always had been - if Demetri was the face of the rebellion, then the pale man was undoubtedly their eyes, eyes that were always turned inwards. Demetri knew that Täj's notebooks would already be full of observations about the thirty-four girls in question, and indeed, the other rebel was pulling his notepad from within his jacket and passing it over to his king with a slightly apprehensive expression, like he wasn't sure Demetri would like what Täj had to say. Demetri opened it to its first page, and ran a bruised thumb along the almost incomprehensible writing that covered every inch of the paper. He hadn't been lying when he compared Täj to his brother; though he knew the handwriting might be incomprehensible to anyone else, Demetri could read it with ease. The first entry was entitled _Soledad Delrío_, and although the first sentence on the page said _doesn't say much_, the absolute tsunami of information that followed sort of defied that judgment. This weren't just Täj's opinions - he had clearly gleaned the opinions of the security details, of Uzohola, of the other Selected.

He turned a few pages, and paused at the one that had been left blank at the centre, with a simple DOMINICA in sloped calligraphy along the top line and empty lines following. "And Vardi Tayna?" When Demetri smiled, it pulled a little higher on one side, made the expression look slightly crooked and unbalanced, a tiny imperfection that somehow made the rest of it look a little bit better for not being uncannily flawless. It had been like that for as long as Täj could remember. He could recall noticing it the first time that he had met the king-that-was-to-be, when they had just been two small blonde boys adrift in the desert, lost in a rebellion that was not yet theirs. "Our girl is settling in?" He sounded like he had only just avoided calling her _my girl._ He looked up and met Täj's eyes, and seeing the expression that flitted across the pale man's face, the King in Exile continued quickly: " She's making friends? She's eating healthy? You know, her mother and I _worry _about her..."

Täj couldn't hold back a wry chuckle. This, he thought, was peak Demetri. Lying half-murdered in a tent for dead men on the edge of the desert, and still trying to make his friends laugh... and pull information out of them, at the same time. "I couldn't tell you."

"She hasn't left her room?"

Täj laughed, quite hollowly. "I mean, if _she_ had a say in the matter..." He scuffed a heel across the dirt surface of the tent floor, and exhaled smoke, and added, "High command was pretty clear. She wants in to the Selection, then she's in." He shrugged. "That means she has to follow the rules." Demetri and Täj may as well have been strangers to her now. Well, one stranger, Täj thought, looking at Demetri, one potential husband.

"Vardi Tayna," Demetri mused. "And _rules_. What an awful, awful pairing." But his concern for the younger girl was obvious, and a little touching, and entirely unfair to the rest of the Selected. Rebels looked after their own. The inner circle looked after their own. Demetri looked after his own. Sometimes it was the most frustrating thing in the world, Täj thought, because Demetri protected people the same way Thiago did - almost against their will, without telling them his plans, break their hearts to save their skins.

"Just take her on a really nice date to make it up to her. You know. Break into a bank or something."

"Get into a bar fight."

"Steal state secrets."

"Something _romantic_," Demetri agreed. But there was something gutted about the way that he said it, like he had exhausted whatever small stores of energy he had reserved for this discussion, like his injuries had gradually depleted him once more and left him almost as pale and tired as Täj himself.

Täj patted his old friend very gingerly on his shoulder. "You're gonna be okay."

Demetri nodded tirely. "Yeah. I'll be fine. Like I said..." He gestured. "Just bad luck that they caught my face, you know?"

Täj knew. He thought Enyakatho had been on the verge of kissing Wick earlier that day when they had determined that they had enough footage of Demetri to keep Reports running until the worst of his injuries had healed - Demetri in newly won towns participating in humanitarian efforts and rescue campaigns, Demetri surveying rebel plantations and the crops they were managing to produce self-sufficiently, myriad shots of Demetri reading and looking thoughtful and laughing relaxedly at something someone had said just off-camera. The palace didn't even have to know, Täj thought ruefully. They'd just keep fitting him in here and there with old footage, making him look like the busiest invalid that there ever was.

The Selected didn't have to know, either. A regular Prince Hatt, Täj thought - here is your king, here is the man you will marry, here is the famed lost son of this great nation named Demetri Dunin, but look not upon his face or you may not like what you see.

Was Ysabel petty enough that she had aimed to accomplish exactly this?

Or was it, he thought, as Demetri had said - just bad luck.

* * *

Vivian Lahela was a short, pale woman with a severe bob haircut, light peruvian brown eyes the colour of smoky topaz, and a light sheen of sweat on her forehead betraying just how badly her nerves were fraying at this whole situation. Despite the obvious uncertainty etched in her eyes - was she expecting to offer an explanation or undergo an execution? - she had dressed impeccably for this meeting, in a green wool dress that grazed her knees and a black blazer wih a severe cut that suggested her usual position of authority, when meetings were held in the glossy skyscraper offices of Axiom, rather than this wide, white throne room. She had three strings of pearls around her wrist, and the tiny beads were clacking against each other as her hands shook.

Mordred almost felt sorry for her.

Almost.

He reclined in the throne that had been his father's, and looked away from Vivian Lahela for the first time since she had walked into the room, to look across the stony faces of his counsellors, who were fanned out in a crescent half-moon shape following the curve of the chamber's northern wall. The Queen Regent had elected, as she always did, to sit among them, shoulder-to-shoulder with Mordred's Minister for Finance and Minister for Education, old men and women with salt and pepper at the temples dressed in neat suits of muted colours, and now she leaned forward in her seat as though it were possible to focus closer on what the newspaper editor had to say.

Vivian Lahela was the kind of person the term loyalist had been crafted to describe. Her newspaper was glossy and respectable and purchased around the world as _the _Illéan newspaper, and the reports that appeared on its clean, brow pages were always thoroughly researched, entertainingly discursive, and slavishly in line with the palace's version of events. In other words, Mordred thought darkly, Vivian Lahela's whole business model was propping up the royal family, and her only daugher had just absconded over to the insurgent group that wanted them dead.

And no one seemed angrier about that fact Vivian Lahela herself. Though her hands were shaking, Mordred was beginning to think that might be from repressed anger rather than fear, such venom did she spit as she spoke about her daughter. Mordred didn't think it mattered what question he had just asked her - the answer was sure to be along the same lines regardless. "Your Majesty, my daughter is a _traitor_. I have no idea why... or how..." Her words seemed to be getting away from her. She had to pause and collect her thoughts. "My family condemns her actions, your Majesty, and more importantly, so does the entire Axiom organisation. We recognise only one royal family, one king, one nation. I am sure that you can find it in your... that your boundless mercy and unending patience will permit you to forgive my family, and see that we are innocent of the actions of our daughter."

Mordred paused. His mother had purposefully averted her eyes. He knew that whispers said she was the true power behind the throne, that the crown prince was a mere figurehead who danced on her strings and to her tunes, that she was Queen in all but title and crown. That was what appealed to them about the imposter Demetri, he thought grimly. That was what the people found attractive - the idea that he was a kind of king beyond the traditional structures of the royal family and the palace, free of the rigid formal traditions, unlikely to be bribed or make his decisions based on the favour so-and-so's great-great-great-grandfather had performed for King Marcus a dozen generations ago. He was a rogue and a rebel who could lay claim to righteousness on the back of a war that had been started long before he or Mordred had entered this world, and would continue long after they had exited it.

Plus, of course, even the girls at court in Angeles couldn't hold back from pointing out how handsome he was. Liara Lee, the daughter of Ysabel's most valued commander, had taken to saying as much when she knew Mordred was in earshot, just so that she could shoot him a cynically mocking look directly afterwards.

She was one of the only people in the entire kingdom that would survive doing as much. Liara Lee was the closest thing to a princess the Illéan military had, the daughter of the army's favourite son, and was the only person that Mordred could consider calling a friend. She had played with Mordred and Demetri when they were children - any kind of respect or fear that the ordinary person held for their king had been eroded by years of exposure to them in all the awkward aspects of childhood and adolescence. Liara had grown up in the same poisonous environment as Mordred had, had experienced the same thorny vacuum left behind after Demetri's abduction and murder, had been shaped by the same forces that had made Mordred...

Well.

Mordred's voice made the older woman look up from the tiles for the first time, her gaze very steady for her apparent fright. You didn't get to the sort of position Vivian Lahela held without having nerves of steel. "Mrs Lahela." The first thing that he had learned when he became the crown prince was that speaking in an official capacity was a simple matter of following the same formula each time, like the simplest of mathematical equations. "Thank you for your testimony." _Keep her on your side__. _ "You have been a most loyal citizen to this nation, and a most thoughtful friend to our family." _Personalise it__._ "Indeed, I know my father used to read your newspaper every morning, and would often remark that he thought you understood what was going on in our nation much more keenly than even he." _Sympathise_. "I am so sorry that this tragedy has befallen your family." He wasn't sure if he was keeping the boredom from his voice. "I hope you know that the royal family stands behind our lost Daughters of Illéa, and the families that their disappearances have left bereft." _Reassure her__._ "If your daughter has defected of her own will, then that is a sin that she has alone committed. Your family will face no retribution for the same." _Commit_. "If your daughter has been taken against her will by these rebels, then we shall spare no effort in achieving her..." _What was that word again_? "In ensuring that she is brought home safely. I will not sleep easy at night until I know that she is back where she belongs." A month ago, he would have concluded_like my brother, Demetri__,_ but things were different now. A man with Demetri's name was Enemy Number One, and any comparison with Vivian Lahela's daughter might produce a report in the next day's Axiom that the palace was planning to shoot the rebel Selected on sight.

Vivian Lahela curtsied low. The more dogged the fighting in the south, the more loyal Axiom 's penmanship became - at its height, when the one they called Thiago Wesick had waged a battle in St George with casualties in the hundreds and thousands, the palace had been forced to dispatch a tactful handler to meet with Lahela and her editorial team, and request that they tone down the propagandist edge that the paper had taken. After all, Mordred mused, you could win people's loyalty given enough money, but authenticity and reliability was much tougher to achieve. They needed a paper that wouldn't just agree with them, but which would sell thousands of copies in Swendway and France and the Russian Federation. The dogged determination with which each anti-rebel article was written, of course, had earned Vivian Lahela a certain degree of respect and prestige within the court at Angeles. Mordred knew for a fact that she was a regular invitee to events thrown by his aunt Elyzabeta, and that her disappeared daughter had frequently been spotted around Angeles on the arms of various high-profile figures: Kristof Henderson, lead actor on Diadem, celebrity athletes, the son of Ysabel's advisor, and yet others. The Lahela women were Establishment, and that made a defected Lahela woman an absolute liability.

"Thank you," Vivian Lahela said softly. "Thank you, your Majesties. I can assure you that Axiom remains steadfast behind you, and behind your righteous cause."

"Your support is appreciated greatly." That ws Queen Ysabel, leaning forward in her chair, her eyes kind and warm. "Vivian, as a mother similarly bereaved, please know that I relate entirely to the distress you must be feeling. If there is anything else that we can do to help you and your family through this tough time, please let us know."

"With all due respect, your Highness,"Vivian Lahela replied softly. "I would prefer that you not do yourself the disservice of comparing our situations. Your son was wrongfully stolen from you. Mine betrayed our nation. But I thank you for your kindness."

Ysabel inclined her head in answer. Mordred said, "Mrs Lahela, thank you for coming here today. You have done your civic duty in doing so. Please allow our guards to show you out, and see you home."

The door had just closed behind her when Mordred reclined back in his throne and said, to no one in particular, "I want her followed. I want her entire family followed. I want her staff followed. If any of them so much as look south, I want to know about it."

He said it to no one in particular, but there was a flurry of activity in the corner as his Minister for Intelligence made note of the same. Right now, they couldn't afford to do much more to the editor of the most influential paper in the nation - particularly as he was sure she was headed straight home to compose vehement condemnations of the so-called regime in the Wastelands. That much might be enough to save her. Mordred had almost lost track of all the judgments that he had passed in this strangely airless room over the course of the past two days - some families were to suffer surveillance for the betrayal of their daughters. Some were to suffer much worse.

It was becoming very clear, however, that almost all of them had not had any idea of what their daughters were planning, and that their Selection had come as a complete surprise. The rebels had broadcast a lot of footage from Whites and Yukon from the night after the drawing had supposedly taken place on the fake Report - men and women dancing in the street, fireworks over the water - but for those girls who had escaped south from Illéan provinces, there had been only an odd, strained silence.

Much like Vivian Lahela, Mordred almost felt sorry for them. Those girls - those beautiful, accomplished Daughters of Illéa - had no idea what awaited them in the Wastelands, precisely what they were running towards, how they would be treated in the rebel heartlands. They were leaving their nation behind for a lie, Mordred thought, a lie beautifully told but a lie nonetheless.

So many lost girls.

Some more lost than others.

The Lahela family had been the last to be spoken to, interoggated and assessed, so Mordred stood, and stretched, and moved languidly down the steps to move towards the back door of the throne room, which led directly into a narrow stone corridor and out into the rose gardens beyond - originally intended as an escape hatch, Mordred thought ruefully, now more frequently used when he tired of wearing Demetri's crown and sitting on Trajan's throne and issuing Ysabel's edicts. The garden had once been the exclusive demesne of Jael, Mordred's father's first wife, until Liara had rehabilitated it and rescued it from the encroaching waste.

"Mordred."

The crown prince turned at the sound of his name, and raised an eyebrow. His uncle sounded... sorrowful.

"Set. What's wrong?"

Queen Regent Ysabel was hugging her arms. She had deep, dark shadows wrought under her eyes, and new lines turning down the sides of her mouth. Set had stepped forward from his usual position, under the window, between the oil paintings of his father and brother which adorned the southern wall of the throne room. Now, he put a hand on the queen's arm as she said,"Mordred." Set had set his jaw, and looked rather pained. "It's Liara."

Mordred blinked in confusion and smiled almost automatically, clearly not understanding what his mother was trying to say. "Liara?" He looked at the advisors that had stayed in the room - yes, and there was Liara's father, Commander Henry Lee, an imposing man with broad shoulders who had always remained one of Queen Ysabel's most fervent supporters. "I don't understand." Commander Lee didn't seem to be able to look Mordred in the eye, but kept his eyes trained on the throne, his hands clenched tightly where they rested on his lap. "Is she okay? Has something happened?"

Set stepped forward slowly. "She's gone, Mordred."

Ysabel's voice was poisonous. "She's gone _south."_

South. South was scrubland and hinterland and waste. South was desert flowers and blue skies and white sunlight. South was barbed wire and dirt roads and debris where towns had once been

"Gone..." Mordred blanched. "Liara's gone into the -"

He glanced around the room, sure that someone was about to contradict him, and realised that none of the advisors seemed to have the courage to meet his gaze.

None but one.

"Into the Selection," Commander Lee said, very darkly. His voice was hoarse and husky, like he was wrenching the words out by force. Mordred's eyes met his, and could not seem to look away. "My daughter has gone into the false Selection."

Mordred set his jaw. "It's not... Demetri. She _knows _it's not Demetri. Why would she..."

If Eden Lahela's defection looked bad, _this _one might destroy them.

Set put his hand on his nephew's shoulder. "We think that... she believes that it is him. That it is Demetri."

"It's not," Mordred said shortly.

Queen Ysabel had walked over towards the throne to set her hand on its arched back, but at her son's words she turned on him with a ferocity, her green eyes blazing. "Really?" She arched an eyebrow as she glared at Mordred. "It's not Demetri?"

Mordred did not react. "It can't be."

"How can you be sure?"

Mordred 's gaze did not waver. He looked around the room, at all of the assembled courtiers and advisors and councillors, and nodded, quite firmly. "Of course I can be sure," he said, and he did not allow himself to sound uncertain when he said it. "Of course it's not him. The man using my brother's name is an imposter. A liar. A killer masquerading as a king."

He cast his eyes about for anyone who wanted to disagree with him.

"And when he runs out of foxholes to hide in - and he _will _\- I'll kill him like I killed their General."

And that, he thought, will be that.

* * *

**Hi, everyone, I hope you have enjoyed this chapter! I know it's a little light on the Selected girls, but I really wanted to give you an insight into the current royal court, into Mordred's head, and into how Illéa is reacting to the Selection. Please do let me know what you thought - every single review genuinely makes my day,and I love hearing what you like and don't like so far, especially when it comes to characters that you prefer to others. I really appreciate absolutely any and all feedback you can give me.**

**There are still loads of spots open in the Selection!**

**Thanks so much. I hope you enjoyed!**

**\- Izar**


	6. Now Bold Now Faint

**Chapter Six:**** N****ow Bold Now Faint**

* * *

_When I see them I can almost swear: that grey is from Whistler's brain! __  
__That crimson flush was Turner's brush! And the gold is Claude Lorrain._

\- William Percy French

* * *

There was a crack and a flash and a finger of smoke rose very slowly from the magnesium flash lamp that the rebellion's propagandist was holding aloft to illuminate the rapidly darkening space behind the safe-house. "Hold it there, girls, thank you for your patience, you're all looking lovely..." He was using a very old camera, Saran saw, the wet plate kind that you still sometimes saw old men in Choibalsan hawking at narrow stalls on market day, cleverly appropriated from antique collections in Hohhot, all finely polished mahogany, cloth bellows and brass focusing screws, clearly treasured despite its age. "Alright..." Enyakatho Imfazwe adjusted one of the dials on his camera and raised his lamp once again, his dark eyes narrowed in focus. "Over here and broad smiles, girls, everyone looking _happy_..."

Saran Altai smiled narrowly as instructed, but she could not shake her strong sense of unease at the entire tableau laid out before them. The Selected girls had been grouped together on one of the few flat plateaus of land in the vicinity of the safehouse; behind them a long ribbon of red and yellow soil spilled out towards the darkening horizon like an unspooled thread of sand. They were arranged in four short lines for the purposes of the photo: the taller ladies, like Nina Novak, the Carolina girl with sunken eyes and thick brows, and Soledad Delrío, the Honduraguan lawyer with warm brown skin, were made taller with the use of a rickety wooden bench at the back of the group, while the more petite girls, like the delicate and doe-eyed ice princess, Yue Yukimura, had been positioned at the front, right beside Saran herself - who was not remotely resentful at having been deemed _short _by these arrangements, thank you very much, even though it would be much fairer to say she was of average height and anyway, everyone knew that girls in the Selection skewed a little taller than the rest of the population.

They had been arranged into an artful semblance of stylish relaxation - that was easier for some than others. The socialite Eden's hair swept over one shoulder with her head tilted towards the sunrise like she was listening to someone tell a joke, eyes aglitter like she was waiting for the punchline, like a perfectly composed sculpture of tranquility, but the girl behind her, the scarred rebel from Tammins, didn't seem to know the meaning of the word _candid_, and Enyakatho, the photographer, had to keep reminding her to let her shoulders relax a little, look a little less intense, stare into the lens with a little less fervour. Privately, Saran thought that the Tammins girl, Atiena Morris, probably had the more apt demeanour for the setting, for once you cared to look beyond the tiered arrangement of the Selection's ranks, waiting on the next shot to be taken, you realised exactly how incongruous they actually were, for on either side of their systematic pale perfection, men and women in khaki and torn clothes milled about with rifles strapped to their back and blood staining their shoes, malnourished dogs with yellow snarls paced back and forth with barely restrained urgency, and their co-ordinator was sitting with her clipboard in the passenger seat of the metal shell of what had once been a functional automobile, now sitting doorless and wheelless and windowless in the shadow of the tall, narrow safehouse.

From chaos, Saran thought narrowly, Enyakatho had wrought the tiniest facade of composure. She was sure that the photo being taken would reflect absolutely none of it.

She turned towards the camera, she broadened her smile, and there was another thunderous crack, a white-bright flare of light, and then Enyakatho was lowering the smoking lamp and saying, his voice cheerful, "absolutely flawless, ladies, thank you for your co-operation." He nodded to one of the rebels - one of the many grim-eyed, stone-faced men with calloused hands and scars on his face - who nodded and looked over his shoulder and barked something in Uzohola's direction, apparently to signal that the meal could begin in earnest, now that the rebellion had gathered enough propaganda to fuel a few Reports. While the photos had been taken, and inspected, and taken again, and the girls rearranged, and more photos taken, and criticisms made, and yet more photos taken, the rebels had been setting up three long tables, a few dozen yards away from the photography setup, near the open fires and narrow barbecue stoves from which wafted the hunger-stoking aroma of cooking meat and stewing spicy sauces.

"Alright, ladies," Uzohola called. "Get it while it's hot!"

As the girls scattered to pick out positions among the three long tables that had been set out in the desert, Saran glanced at the girl next to her. She knew that Yue had the room directly above hers, and had glimpsed her a few times on various television broadcasts of this or that winter sporting event, but their introduction had been a hasty, whispered one as they were positioned side-by-side for the photo. They were from neighbouring provinces of Yukon and Whites, which made the Mongolian girl feel almost instantly a little more comfortable, despite the alien land in which she found herself now stranded. "Thank god that's over," Saran murmured softly, and was rewarded with a soft laugh from Yue.

"I thought it was nice," the ice princess remarked mildly.

Saran tugged at her collar. She was wearing one of her sister's dresses, a preppy red number with a neat white collar and short sleeves that were proving less and less of a good idea as the sun sank behind the horizon. "I'd be tempted to agree if I wasn't _starving_."

"Yukimura!" The dangerous-looking girl from Sonage was waving Yue over to sit beside her. The smaller Whites girl's obvious surprise and confusion was endearing as she blinked and stared at the waving hand. "Saved you a seat, darling!"

Saran quirked a half-smile that faded slowly as she realised that positions around the various tables were rapidly being snapped up as the Selected girls swiftly bunched together into make-shift alliances, some chatting and laughing with candor, others quieter and scanning their surroundings. There was an obvious separation, Saran thought, between the southern girls who came from rebel provinces, who looked a little more accustomed to the distinctly warzone air, and the more northern girls who had betrayed their Crown to travel into foreign territory and looked ill at ease. Liara Lee and Eden Lahela, both defectors from the most decadent layers of Angeles high society, had taken seats together closest to the safehouse, while the keen-eyed Marjorie Vermudez was positioned closest to the stove - not, Saran thought, for quickest access to the food, but apparently with the intention of striking up a conversation with Atiena Morris, the rebel who looked like she hadn't eaten or slept in several years, and with Lissa Dove, the bubbly and slightly sickly looking blonde that looked like she was badly in need of a haircut and a few extra pints of blood.

This pattern was repeated across all three of the long tables: southern girls sitting with southerners, northern girls with northerners, Crown defector with Crown defector, rebels with rebels. A new sort of caste system, Saran thought darkly. Girls from the rebel heartland in the north seemed to be an unhealthy medium between the two, which Saran thought was probably why Yue looked so relieved to have a place to sit with the girl from Sonage. Saran herself, however, wasn't exactly sure which side would take her, which was why she put a hand very gently on the crook of Yue's arm and said, very softly, "can I..."

"Oh," Yue said, and sounded a little relieved that she had asked. "_Please _do."

Saran smiled at Yue, and they went over together to slide into seats beside and opposite the former Six, who was, Saran was now recalling, named Corvina Rouen - a suitably dark and enigmatic name, Saran thought, for such a dark and enigmatic girl. She was sitting with another northern girl, Ekaitza Jones, the Atlin girl with slightly wolfish eyes and only four fingers on her left hand, but Lady Ekaitza seemed inclined to leave the talking to Lady Corvina who leaned back in her chair and waved her fingers at Saran. "Saran Altai?"

"The same. Corvina Rouen?"

"Got it in one." There was something unpleasant about the way that Corvina smiled, like she only did so because she knew something that you did not. "Lovely to meet you. Settling in alright?"

Saran shrugged. "As well as I can." She cast a look between the other three girls. "I'm not the only one who finds it all a bit... well, odd?"

"It's a rebel Selection." Ekaitza Jones had a dry, drawling voice that made everything sound sardonic and sarcastic, even when Saran wasn't sure she intended to sound that way. "Odd doesn't begin to describe it. I'm just astounded we're not being kept in an underground bunker somewhere outside the United Sultanates."

Yue glanced at Lady Ekaitza. She sounded like she didn't know if the other girl was joking. "In a bunker?"

The Baffin girl rolled her eyes cynically. "Photos look the same whether we're in Illéa or out of it. It would have made much more sense to move us to a friendly country and hold the Selection there. Do they _really _think the Wastelands are far enough from the palace?"

Lady Corvina still looked amused. "I would lower your voice, Jones. You wouldn't want to insult our hosts."

Lady Ekaitza shot Lady Corvina a long, suspicious look, but fell silent just as the older girl had suggested. Ekaitza had the same hungry look as a lot of the rebels, Saran thought, lean with a somewhat feral beauty, harsh and rough where Corvina was sleek and sharp and silky - a mafia princess if Saran had ever seen one, like one of the spoiled bratva girls who toured Ulaanbaatar in brightly coloured sport cars with their _pakhan _daddy and more ill-gotten wealth than they had common sense. Sitting here in the dying light of the sun, Saran rather thought Ekaitza looked like Corvina's enforcer.

"Cor," Yue said, quite softly, and Saran blinked to hear the diminuitive fall from the sweet-faced girl's mouth. "Have you heard anything about the king? I don't see him..." She glanced around the open space at the soldiers moving back and forth around the girls, reminding Saran a little of dogs among sheep, at once corralling them and providing an implicit promise of retribution if they stepped out of line. They had seemed so threatening at first, Saran thought, but if you looked hard enough and watched long enough, you could see the humanity, the warmth, the wildness that southerners always talked about when they spoke about the rebels: a girl with short blue hair threw back her head and laughed loudly at something Enyakatho had said, her hand resting on the butt of her shotgun, and gestured a friend over to repeat the joke to them. A group of rebels were gathered like a flock of birds around the stoves, tearing chunks out of a newly baked loaf of bread. Uzohola had migrated to the hood of the stripped-out car, and was speaking quietly to Wickaninnish Harjo, that one rebel that absolutely everyone knew - though usually he was serving soup to refugees or overseeing first aid after a battle, in the shaky footage that first filtered out of battlefields. He had become something of a fascination for young people in Yukon, but from this close proximity, Saran could see that pictures didn't really do him justice. If Demetri was pure light, then Wickaninnish Harjo was all shadows, with dusky brown skin and inky black hair and clever almond eyes that lit up now at something Uzohola had said. He had a very white smile when he laughed.

Saran realised that she was staring, and turned back to the group as quickly as she could.

Lady Corvina shook her head. "Like our friend Jones here said," she said. "This is a rebel Selection. I don't think we can try to predict anything until we get our bearings."

Yue relaxed visibly at these words. Saran understood. It was much more difficult to relax when you were wondering if the king was watching you, how you were coming across, whether you should speak a little quieter or laugh a little louder. But, she thought to herself, her eyes scanning across the rebels, it would probably be a good idea to assume anything you did would get reported back to him nevertheless. Well, she wouldn't have much to worry about. Being herself couldn't drive her too far astray - if she was going to have a chance in this competition, she would prefer that she didn't gain it by pretending to be someone she wasn't.

"But no," Corvina added. "I haven't heard anything."

Yue smiled, slightly hopefully. "Well, you never know."

"I don't think he's going to show up," Saran said. "Look at how relaxed everyone is. Surely there would be more security if the king was going to show up?"

Lady Ekaitza cocked an eyebrow. "And here I was hoping they'd think _we _were worth protecting."

Lady Corvina's smile was faint, just barely turning up the corners of her lips, only the slightest laughter lines spreading out from her dark eyes. "Some of us, maybe." Her voice, however, was distracted. Then, as though no one had been speaking, she continued, "He's shorter than I expected." There was a note of admiration in her voice, a note of amusement. A symphony of ironic smugness, Saran thought, and was very glad that she had not yet sufficiently earned Corvina's ire to have the Sonage girl look at her like _that_. But who had?

"The prince?" Saran swung to search the ranks of the rebels. She could not see who Lady Corvina was looking at; the group of rebels were small, but after such a long journey, Saran found it difficult to remember faces at this point - it may as well have been a sea of strangers, without repetition, without consistency. Every time she learned a new name or glimpsed a new figure, she felt certain that she was going to have to be introduced to them another thousand times. "Or, I guess, the king?"

"No," Corvina said, quite detachedly. That smile was _wicked_. She turned back to her companions, but Saran could see that her gaze was focused on something very far away from the Wastelands. "No," she said again. "Not the king."

Rebel soldiers were making their way up and down the long tables, setting out long serving plates heaped with roasted vegetables and freshly baked bread and cheese smuggled over the border from the Saharan federation, racks of grilled meat and tofu dripping juice, bowls of fragrant fried rice and cheesy, creamy potatoes drowned in cheese. Looking at the food as it passed her, Saran was strangely gratified to recognise a few dishes from her childhood - parcels of khuushur, little packages of deep fried mutton, and boortsog, Mongolian cookies soaking in yak's milk cream. That made a certain sort of sense; Mongolian foods were calculated for production on the steppes, under the open sky, where resources might be scarce and time to cook very short. Watching the other tables be served, Saran realised her stomach felt like an open pit. They had eaten sandwiches on their way here, in an Illéán diner with a portrait of Queen Ysabel prominent behind the deli counter. Saran had kept her head down; her minder, a rat-faced man from Laos by way of Carolina, had insisted on chatting to their waiter, and to the family sitting next to them, and to the Illéan soldiers who had been behind them in the line, almost reveling in the ignorance of everyone around them.

Saran hadn't really been able to enjoy her sandwich.

"Any issue with the food..." Saran's saw Yue's eyes snap up before she heard the rebel's voice. Wickanninish Harjo was putting a platter of unidentifiable meat in front of them, an easy-going smile on his face as he greeted them. "Keep it to yourself." He winked, and Saran felt her heart skip a beat. _Wow_. "Lady Ekaitza, Lady Corvina, Lady Yue..." Had they learned everyone's names and faces by heart? Harjo looked at Saran. "Lady Saran. Settling in alright?"

"Yes," Saran replied. "Settling in fine."

"Super. Be careful with the plate. It's hot."

He straightened, and walked away, and Saran fixed her gaze on her plate until she was sure he was gone and she wasn't at risk of making a further fool of herself. Lady Corvina's cool gaze suggested she knew exactly what was going on in Saran's mind, but thankfully sweet little Yue and harsh lean Ekaitza were there to pull the spotlight away and refocus things on something more light-hearted and less likely to make Saran want the earth to swallow her.

"God, that smells good. Throw me one of those bread rolls, Rouen? Don't know if they're gonna have enough food to feed us tomorrow, so let's make the most of tonight..."

"Would you like some tea, Saran? I think it's green... no, it's okay, I have a cup for you here."

Silence fell, as Saran knew would fall. The ladies all seemed hungry, but equally unwilling to betray that fact to the girl next to her, so it was with a restrained zeal that the food was torn into. Lissa Dove, the ethereal blonde waif from earthquake-prone Likely, looked like she was barely holding back from shoving food into her pockets for later. Saran couldn't say that she didn't see the appeal in such an idea, but she wasn't sure that the dress she was wearing had enough subtle hiding places to get away with it without embarrassing herself.

Instead, bearing in mind Lady Ekaitza's dour predictions of gloom, she tried to just enjoy the food that they had, just in case tomorrow they did not.

* * *

After dinner, the girls began to slowly filter back into the safehouse, warm and satiated and overall feeling a little bit more optimistic about this whole Selection business. In lieu of the Women's Room which was a central hub in the Angeles palace, the safehouse in the Wastelands had a wide patio wrapping around its western face, with old mismatched armchairs and couches scattered here and there, and what had perhaps once been a library on the first floor which had been reappropriated into a sitting room, lit all gold-orange by lamps strewn around the room. The thirty five girls seemed inclined to split themselves fairly evenly between these spaces and their appointed rooms, but Uzohola was waiting at the rear door of the building and picking out girls, apparently at random, to send upstairs to the music room. She seemed apologetic. "It'll be quick," she promised. "Enyakatho just wants to get a few interviews, chat to you a little about your experiences..." When she saw a few girls turn pale at this prospect, she added, her voice a little lower, like she didn't want any of the other rebels to hear her: "if you'd rather not, just tell me..."

In the end, seven girls were sent up to what had once been a music room. The sitting room was abuzz with rumours about what this distinction represented: was it a good sign to be picked, or a very bad one? If there was one way to get the girls talking to one another, Soledad Delrío thought ruefully, it was to start a fight. She found it highly unlikely that the king had managed to make any decisive observations by this point, particularly when he hadn't even been around to meet them... and certainly, if he had, then she thought her opinion of him was going to suffer quite a bit. But even though she told herself this fact quite vehemently, she could not restrain herself from looking around the assembled girls waiting in the corridor, and trying to pick out similarities and differences herself: there was Yue Yukimura, the palely delicate championship iceskater from Whites, and her northern compatriot, the short Yukon girl, Saran Altai, who wore her dark hair in an impossibly intricately braid. There was Evangeline Khan, the rose-haired Sultanate girl from Calgary with a gray scarf loosely covering her hair and a large diamond in either earlobe. There was Irri Kelly, who had inherited her peculiarly light brown eyes, so pale as to seem gold, from her French mother, who had been one of the Elite in King Trajan's Selection. And there was Liara Lee, the girl with the sharp features and the sharp wit and the sharp, clean Angeles accent, beside whom Eden Lahela, the gorgeous socialite with the watchful eyes, had sat during dinner.

And, of course, there was Sol herself.

She wasn't entirely sure what she had done to deserve her place among the rest.

The door to the music room swung open and allowed Irri Kelly to slip out and down the hallway before she could meet anyone else's eye. Enyakatho, the photographer from earlier in the day, appeared on the threshold, leaning against the wooden frame in a casual way that let his purple waistcoat fall open and reveal the revolver he had tucked into his belt, next to a clip carrying extra rolls of tape. That was something Marjorie Vermudez had very quietly pointed out to Sol earlier, when they had been positioned together for photos before dinner, and the corners of their mouths had become exhausted from smiling - "they're using really retro equipment, right? Like, _vintage_. It's not just me?"

It wasn't just her.

"Lady Soledad?" Enyakatho looked about the small group of girls, and smiled broadly. "Hey, there you are. We'll try not to keep you too long... You five hold tight, you'll only have to wait a few more minutes. Come on in, Lady Soledad."

The music room was airy and gorgeous in a sort of forsaken way, with ivy still winding tightly around the legs of the grand piano which took up the corner of the chamber in front of the floor-to-ceiling French windows. There was a velvet chair pushed between the piano and the edge thick red velvet curtains which framed those windows; put together, Soledad thought that Enyakatho's team had succcessfully managed to once again carve out a small niche of elegance and faded beauty in an otherwise quite ruined space. And there were his team - the small, boyish Wren with her hair styled into a blue crewcut, and the languid Farid, who was manning one of the old-fashioned 35mm cameras with which the rebels seemed to be capturing most of the action around them.

"Won't you please sit down," Enyakatho said, gesturing towards the velvet chair. "Is she centred? No? Lady Soledad, can you move a little to your right? We're just trying to capture the light... Excellent. Now, Lady Soledad, Wren here will be asking you the questions, they're not too difficult, pretty soft, just _hi, how are you_ and _how are you liking things here so far_ and that sort of thing, just remember that you should answer her, not talk into the camera, I know that's easier said than done, but we can redo a few shots if it takes you a little while to get the hang of it, alright?"

Sol nodded hesitantly. The man spoke like he was trying to keep a hurricane trapped behind his teeth - all quick bites of sound with a narrow mouth. "I think I can manage."

"Great. Can you move your hair, just a bit there? We want to... no, that's perfect. Wren, she's all yours. And we're rolling."

The blue-haired girl smiled. She had an androgynous kind of frame, small and skinny and somehow shapeless, with a flat face and bright, narrow bird-like eyes that seemed to naturally relax into a smile when no other expression was required. She didn't seem the likeliest candidate to serve as the voice of a national regime, but all doubts melted away once she began to speak. She had a rich, smooth voice - what Sol imagined caramel might sound like. "Lady Soledad. Thank you for sitting down with us this evening. I trust the Court in Exile has been taking good care of you?"

The Court in Exile? Why did Wren talk about them like she wasn't one of them, embedded as deeply into their ranks as a tick into the side of a dog? They were playing a game, Sol sensed immediately, one in which the Report was just one of many boards on which to put their pieces.

"They have been minding us wonderfully." Enyakatho's smile suggested this was the right thing to say. Sol elaborated a little: "there's nothing a Honduraguan appreciates more than good hospitality, my mother used to say. I've been made to feel very welcome."

Wren seemed to consult her notes, although her next question didn't seem to require the use of notes. "Speaking of Honduragua: you aren't feeling homesick at all? Not missing your family?"

Homesick? When would Sol have had the chance to feel homesick? She'd been here for less than a do, and it had been a constant blur of motion and business and meeting people and learning names. But would a firm _no, I'm not homesick_ seem heartless? Cold? "I wouldn't say... I'm not..." The lens of the camera was like a very dark eye, staring right at her. "I don't think..."

"Cut that," Enyakatho called. "Lady Soledad, address Wren, not the camera. Deep breath. Arrange your thoughts before you speak - we can edit it all together at the end, so don't worry."

Sol swallowed hard. "Yeah, I think I can -"

Enyakatho cut her off. "And rolling."

Sol jumped to answer before Wren could ask her question a second time. "Homesick? No. I know that my family support my choice, and are wishing me well, and we've just been so busy here at court that I've barely had the chance to think about anything."

"Cut that." Enyakatho again. "Lady Soledad, this might just be a personal preference on my part, and I don't want to influence you too much, but that _anything_, I'm not thinking about _anything_, it's bothering me, is it bothering anyone else?"

"I think it's fine," Wren said mildly.

"It's bothering me," Farid agreed lazily.

"It's bother_some_. We don't want you to seem too airheaded, Lady Soledad, can you give me that again but maybe say you've been so busy that you haven't had the chance to worry?" Enyakatho glanced between the interviewer and the cameraman. "Because of course you've been _thinking_ while you're here. Everyone's _thinking_, especially here. So you've been _thinking _but maybe you haven't been _worrying_. Reckon you can do that for me?"

Sol nodded.

"And rolling."

Wren's voice was still perfectly smooth and flawlessly even, like it was her first time asking the question, like it had sprung naturally to her mind that very second. "Speaking of Honduragua: you aren't feeling homesick at all? Not missing your family?"

Sol answered this one carefully, and kept her gaze fixed on Wren's lapel. "Homesick? No. I know my family support what I've decided to do, and they're wishing me the best of luck, and, well, we've just been so busy here at court that I think I've barely had the chance to worry about anything."

"And finally, Lady Soledad." Wren's smile faded. It gave her voice a more solemn, grave quality. "It's the question that absolutely everyone has been asking. Why did you choose to enter the Selection?"

"I..." Sol paused. How much to say? In an ordinary Selection, she might have hesitated to make use of it, to weaponise her own broken heart and grief, but this was no ordinary Selection. "I had my heart broken," she said softly. "And my faith in the justice of this nation shaken." She paused, and took a deep breath. "But when I came south, here, to this Selection, I saw how willing the citizens of the Kingdom in Exile were to put their lives on the line in the name of justice. And I saw how hard the King in Exile worked to make the lives of his people better. And I think... maybe my heart can heal here."

Wren's smile was warm. "Lady Soledad, thank you so much for your honesty."

Enyakatho said, almost immediately, "Farid, she mentioned coming south - I want that cut. Everything else was _perfect_. Wonderfully done, Lady Soledad, you're an absolute natural."

Sol stood, a little shakily, and brushed down her pants, to which a thin layer of dust from the air now clung. "Oh. Thank you, Mr Imfawze."

Enyakatho kept a polite distance as he walked Sol to the door. She wondered what kind of briefing he had been given on the Selected girls - what kind of strict instructions they were all under. There were so many rebels milling about the place, she thought, dangerous-looking women and weary, rough-faced men, that it almost seemed like they were asking for trouble. Those were the kind of situations that recurred on _Diadem_, and similar television shows, and all the reruns of old Selections: Selected girls having torrid affairs with the men assigned to guard their rooms, maids developing fervent and unrequited crushes on their charges, one of the Elite walking in on the prince in a passionate embrace with this or that foreign countess. Apparently there was historical precedent for it; Sol could remember hearing about such a scandal in history class, where King Nerva had eschewed any of the girls in the Selection in favour of a girl who worked in the stables, and who had been forced to abdicate as a result.

Well, Sol thought dryly, she was pretty sure the rebels didn't have any stables, so they would probably be safe on that front.

She offered Evangeline and Yue a slight smile as she passed them on her way out, and went upstairs to her room to find a note pinned to her door. Her heart leaped into her throat when she saw it -_ from King Demetri?_ \- but she had got ahead of herself, for it was Marjorie Vermudez's name scrawled at the bottom and the excitable, spiky script of someone on the hunt for information used throughout: _come find me before you leave_.

Before I leave?

No! They couldn't force her out. Not now. Not yet. Was this because she had messed up the interview? How could they have made that decision so quickly? They couldn't get rid of her on the first day.. Not when she had just begun to forget Emilio. Not before she got the chance to meet Demetri.

Marjorie's room was two floors up from Sol's, so the girl from Honduragua went straight there. Marjorie flung open her door at the first knock, which was fortunate, because Sol was pretty sure if she'd had to wait for very long she might have tried to just kick the door down instead.

"What do you mean," Sol said. She was almost too frazzled to try and sound calm. "What have you heard?"

Marjorie gestured her into the room and shut the door behind her before she answered. "You haven't heard? After Uzohola called you guys upstairs, they announced a huge elimination."

Sol's mouth felt as dry as bone. "They did?"

Marjorie nodded. "They didn't tell us all of the names," she said. "But apparently there were seventeen removals in total. Irri Kelly got kicked out. So did Evangeline Khan. We were starting to think all of the girls getting interviewed were going to be eliminated."

"They haven't said anything to me." Deep breaths, she told herself. There had only been seven girls called for interviews, so even if all of them were eliminated, there were still ten others who hadn't been. That made it very unlikely that being interviewed was a good indicator of anything at all - and, she had to admit, she found it hard to imagine a girl as beautiful and intimidating as Liara Lee being kicked out on her first day. The same went for someone as poised and composed as Eden Lahela, or someone as transparently sweet and pretty as Yue Yukimura. If Irri and Evangeline were gone, then that just meant Sol had outlasted them.

Marjorie seemed to be of the same mindset, because she shrugged. "Then congratulations." She grinned a little. "Sorry to panic you."

"Don't apologise. I should be thanking you for the gossip."

"What was up with those interviews, anyway?"

Was Marjorie jealous she hadn't been given one, or genuinely curious? Sol hesitated, and then she shook her head. "Just... like a fluff piece. _My name is Soledad Delrío and I love the rebellion._ You know?"

Marjorie smiled faintly. "I have a good idea. We'll probably spot you on the next Report."

Of course. Soledad hadn't even considered that. She wondered what her family would make of what she had said. Whether they would be proud of her. Whether they would approve.

"Well." She squared her shoulders. "After that particular bit of excitement, I think I'll head back to my room." Marjorie laughed, and after a moment of consideration, so did Sol. "I think my heart might take issue with me if I don't lie down for a little while. I'll see you tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," Marjorie agreed. "My god, tomorrow. Look at us - already in the last half of the Selection."

Sol smiled in agreement. "I, for one, think we're doing _great _so far."

* * *

**And there we have it - our first entirely Selected focused chapter! I know it was quite short, and didn't feature everyone, but I hope you now have a good feeling for some of the characters in the Selection and what the overall competition is going to feel like. Our viewpoint characters in this chapter were ****_Saran Altai _created by Frenchie is French and ****_Soledad Delrío _created b****y ****Sylea****. I hope you enjoyed seeing the world through their eyes!**

**Please do let me know what you thought - I have been absolutely overwhelmed with gratitude for every single review so far. I really love hearing what you like and don't like, and what you would like to see more of. I really appreciate absolutely any and all feedback you can give me.**

**If you have not yet submitted or reserved your spot, then act quickly, because there is only one more spot open in the Selection!**

**There might not be an update tomorrow, so I hope you can forgive me. **

**Thanks so much. I hope you enjoyed!**

**\- Izar**


	7. Pocketing Threads of Moonlight

**Chapter Seven: Pocketing Threads of Moonlight**

* * *

_Feel tranquility under the canopy of heaven -__  
__Where stars wear the twinkle of chloroform._

\- Robert Dummet

* * *

Ekaitza Jones was unsurprised when there was a knock at her door around midnight.

Nor was she surprised that Cor did not wait for a response.

The czarina of Pandora pushed the bedroom door open, just the tiniest crack, and peered into the dark room, and whispered, "Come on." She did not seem inclined to even try and sound persuasive; the Sonage girl's voice brokered absolutely no debate. Ekaitza should have known better than to try and argue, but arguing was one of the few things the smuggler did well, so she spoke nevertheless.

Ekaitza said, "They'll kill us if they catch us."

In the darkness, Cor's smile was very white. Snow over jagged rocks, Ekaitza thought, thin ice over a bear pit. "Don't you trust me, Jones?"

_Not in the slightest_.

Of course, Ekaitza's protest was a weak one. She was already fully dressed.

"Of course I don't trust you," she said, and slid from her bed, and crossed the room silently. Cor was dressed as a thief might - soft black boots and a long-sleeved black t-shirt and black canvas trousers, her dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail.

Even like this, she managed to look like a rich girl. Well, Ekaitza thought, that was in her best interests. Poor girls couldn't pay you.

And she was certain that Cor would pay. The girl that gangs still called the Raven in the north did not have a reputation for screwing her associates over. That, too, was in Ekaitza's best interests.

So instead she said, her voice low, "you're not as clever as you think you are, Rouen."

They crept down the stairs. The entire safehouse was silent. The windows on each floor were lit a flickering red-orange from bonfires that the rebels had lit outside to keep themselves warm. Most of them were not staying too close to the safehouse, but had ferreted out some hidden places to sleep in the ruined shell of the town in the valley below which was, Ekaitza thought, probably why they had decided they could risk a fire. She had noted how cautious they were about those things, even here in the Wastelands; it reminded Ekaitza of cold nights in the taiga, when you knew that the only thing between you and the authorities was the thick mantle of night, which drew cold about you and drove the breath from your lungs. Those were the worst nights, when you had to choose which death would be slower: being caught by those who chased, or freezing to death in the snow.

Cor shrugged. "If I'm half as smart as I think I am," was her reply. "That's still twice as smart as you. I think we'll shake out alright. Now shut up. Wouldn't want to wake the king's pale dog, would we?"

Ekaitza scowled as they moved past the rooms on the first floor, which belonged to the group the rebels called, quite affectionately, the inner circle. Ekaitza wasn't yet entirely sure who made up that group - Enyakatho seemed a likely candidate, as did Field Marshal Uzokuwa, but she had seen them head out towards the abandoned town earlier in the night to set up camp. Why did that leave behind? "No," she agreed. The man they called Taj gave her the creeps like few other people could. "We wouldn't want that."

They reached the bottom floor and Cor again crept towards the door. For a rich girl, Ekaitza had to give her this - she knew how to walk lightly when she wanted to.

"I'm honestly appalled at this lack of security," Ekaitza muttered. "If we can get _out_, what's stopping people from getting _in_?"

Lissa Dove's laugh ghosted across the sand. As they rounded the house, Ekaitza saw that the ethereal blonde was sitting by the dying embers of the stove, resting her chin in one hand. With the other, she pointed towards the wide expanse of sand that spilled out in all directions as far as the eye could see - which, once the sun had vanished behind the horizon and left the entire Wastelands doused in an impenetrable layer of gloom, was not very far at all. "_That_," Lissa said simply. "Is what's stopping them."

Ekaitza could remember, when she was young, believing that she and her family lived on the very precipice of the entire universe, and if you ventured far enough out to sea, that eventually the ocean would meld with the sky and you would find yourself sailing through stars. If that had been one edge of the world, she thought, then surely this was the other. As they started to walk away from the safehouse, she imagined herself walking and walking and walking until she was adrift amongst the constellations.

At least there was some moonlight by which to navigate their way across the sand. They skirted the edge of the village - Cor allowed Ekaitza to lead, for it was the Baffin girl who knew how to guide their path by the stars in the night sky. You could go anywhere, Ekaitza thought, but the stars would always remain quite true.

They stayed quiet. She wondered what Cor had offered the blonde Likely girl to convince her out with her tonight. She certainly seemed the most reluctant component of the operation. "How far?", she asked now, her voice still grudging, and in the pale wan light of the night sky, Cor's eyes looked like two black pits in a pale face as she turned to Ekaitza for the answer.

"About five miles," was Ekaitza's response. At Lissa's expression, she elaborated: "Just over an hour if we keep our pace up."

"Then let's keep our pace up." Cor's voice was cold. Focused. That was how southerners always sounded, always acted. They had hearts of ice, the lot of them, Ekaitza's grandfather had always said, veins weighed leaden with frost. Was it because they knew they could spare the warmth?

She scanned the sky. Cor's instructions had been refreshingly clear: a long string of numbers, indicating the longtitude and latitude of the location to which she and Lissa needed to be guided. Ekaitza appreciated someone who knew what she wanted, and knew how to ask for it - in turn, she thought Cor seemed to appreciate someone who took a job without asking too many _what_s and _why_s. Someone who could do the job they needed to do.

Ekaitza could definitely do this. Far above them, the plough had rotated anti-clockwise about Polaris, so that it appeared on its side, lying very low, nearly kissing the sand, and Cassiopeia was shining, high and bright, in the west. Mintaka was only just rising in the east - within one degree of true east, Ekaitza knew - and when Ekaitza raised her hands and formed fists and gauged the angle of the north star, she could estimate the latitude of the safehouse, and their current location, and thus ascertain the path they needed to trace across the sand towards Lissa and Cor's rendezvous point.

It was almost soothing. Tracking was therapeutic, even in such an alien land. The Wastelands of sand in the south had some similarities with the wastelands of snow in the north, among which Ekaitza had been raised. But city girls, she was beginning to realise, did not seem to appreciate just how far noise could travel over the flat surface of this kind of wilderness - how the bare rock bounced sound around like it was the ball in some sort of children's game - how even speaking used up a certain amount of energy and focus that might be better spent watching your feet, making sure you weren't about to step on a snake or a poisonous plant. The man who had brought Ekaitza south after the Selection, a short rebel who introduced himself as Mouchard - a name, she suspected, that was meant to be ironic - had warned her of these hazards on their long journey. He had the uncanny ability to simply rattle of names and descriptions of the various plants and animals that might get any runaways before the rebels and Crown did, and Ekaitza had memorised them all.

"Don't step on that," she told Lissa now, and the blonde girl made a face and skirted the innocuous green thistle to which Ekaitza had pointed. It was not all flat sand through which they were walking. There was a little inconsistency, a landscape that reminded Ekaitza of the Australian outback that she had glimpsed in photos - mostly desolate, arid land, but here and there some outcroppings of rock, dropped here and there like dice with which some careless god had been playing. They loomed out of the dark abruptly, at first so suddenly you couldn't tell what they were, and vanished behind the girls once again just as quickly.

Mouchard had smiled when he said it. "If you try to leave before the king dismisses you, we won't even go looking for you until the morning. What would be the point?"

But that was why they were doing this tonight, she thought, looking at the two girls with her. Because the king _had _dismissed a set of girls, and a group of rebels had been dispatched to take them wherever eliminated ladies went. Ekaitza didn't want to think about that too much. She wanted to believe that they would be sent home - that she could go north once more, and hunt, and smuggle, and in the mornings see the sun split into a thousand versions of itself on the cracked ice over Lake Hazen. But not everyone would be welcome in whatever home had once been theirs, she knew, so what happened next?

She was so lost in her own thoughts that she was almost glad to have an excuse to snap out of them as her eyes struck on something in the sand. In the dark, she could barely even see her own feet, but she could clearly perceive here that the sand had been disturbed, churned up by passing footsteps. It was subtle, she thought - people who knew how to cover their tracks, someone who had taken a very circuitous route to avoid being caught. And yet she had caught them anyway.

Or had they caught her?

She held up her hand to signal Cor and Lissa to stop, and knelt to run her fingers along the identation. _Sand_, she thought, with barely restrained frustration. It couldn't hold its shape as surely as snow could - there were no footprints to be divined. She coudn't tell if it was a boot or a dog's paw that had made this mark, or maybe some wild animal, a coyote or a desert fox. But _here _\- she almost smiled - a metal casing in the dirt, still a little bit warm, and a few drops of oil, still wet.

Okay. She stood, and glanced at her companions. "Someone came this way. Heading the way we are. I'm gonna say about ten minutes ago, but that's not precise."

"That's probably just my guy." Cor had that way of speaking, when she said _my guy, _that reminded Ekaitza of mob bosses in old movies, like she had almost forgotten that it was meant to be a euphemism. She wondered how many _guys _Cor had. What was so urgent that she needed to speak to this _guy_ tonight? "It's about that time, isn't it?"

"Why would he be coming from the west?" An excellent question from Lissa. Ekaitza couldn't help but give her a piercing look and wonder what the Likely girl was getting out of this midnight journey. Cor certainly didn't seem to like her very much; she hadn't even feigned friendliness, as she had done with Ekaitza at the beginning. Cor had seemed to assemble a little entourage around her at dinner, so why had they brought the blonde, the tracker wondered, rather than the good-natured Saran or the sweetly supportive Yue?

She had answered her own question. Those girls, out in the Wasteland, in the dark, in open defiance of the king's edicts, with coyotes prowling? No. No need for Saran Altai or Yue Yukimura tonight. Lissa Dove had something Corvina Rouen wanted. Corvina Rouen had something Lissa Dove wanted. This was a barter. Ekaitza could understand that much more clearly than any kind of friendship.

Case in point - Cor was vehemently disagreeing with Lissa. "He'd know better than to go straight."

They kept their voices soft. Ekaitza was almost proud of them. _They grow up so fast_, she thought sardonically.

She paused.

On the horizon.

That was not a star.

Ekaitza was of an average sort of height, so she knew that the horizon was about three miles away. Even if the safehouse was lit up like a beacon, they would be able to see only the faintest dregs of light around its edge, not the building itself. So this light, she thought, fixing her eyes on it. It was about two miles away, and it was _bright_.

It wanted to be seen.

Lissa said, her voice very dry, "Are you sure about that? Would he know better than to do _that_?"

In the dark, Ekaitza could only just make out the shape of Lissa's hair, but she could tell that the other girl was pointing at the light.

Cor was silent for a long moment. Ekaitza started walking again, towards the light, and shook off Lissa's hand impatiently when the Likely girl tried to grab her arm. "They can't see us," Ekaitza said softly. "They can't smell us. They can't hear us, _unless _one of you fucks up. We might as well see who it is."

Cor made a sound in agreement. "I train my people," she said sharply. Though her words were simple, Ekaitza could hear the venom in them. "Whatever this is, _your _side screwed up, Kayleeth."

The whites of Lissa Dove's eyes seemed to glow in the dark as she stared at Cor. "How did you..."

Cor waved away the question. "Jones, you had the right idea. I want a name and a face to put to the idiotic action."

Ekaitza nodded. Lissa, her voice narrow and suspicious, said, "fine". And they crept forward once again.

Ekaitza took the lead. Her eyes had attuned quickly to the dark, but the closer they drew to the light, the more night-blind she felt. She was acutely aware that there could be someone just out of sight a metre to her right, a metre to her left, watching and waiting, and she would be none the wiser. There could have been someone following them, she thought, and the first she would know about it was when they were breathing down her neck. For chrissake, she could _walk right into someone _in this dark.

Abruptly, Ekaitza found herself wondering whether the rebels had night-vision goggles.

At least Baffin had the woods. It was much easier to hide among woods. Here, they were wide open to someone with better vision than they.

Well, Ekaitza thought wryly, it was like her grandfather had always told her when she went out to the woods as a child. You don't need to be faster than the wolf. You just need to be faster than your little brother.

Ekaitza was pretty sure she was faster than Cor or Lissa.

Then again, she'd seen the guns the rebels were carrying. She imagined they were a little bit faster as well.

A shape grew up against the light, as it slowly melted from a single pinprick of yellow in front of them into a circle of illumination in which silhouettes moved back and forth.

Much more than one person. They were only here to meet one person.

And they drew closer still, and Ekaitza held out her arm as though to hold them back, and shot Cor a look that said _this far and no further_. They couldn't risk it, but they were close enough by now - close enough to see that there was a young blond man kneeling in the circle of light which was, Ekaitza thought, a pair of extraordinarily bright headlamps belonging to a dusty truck, one of many the rebels seemed to use to travel around the Wastelands in... well, not style. The men standing around were dressed like the soldiers of the Kingdom in Exile, all dirty jackets and torn trousers, guns slung around their shoulders or worn at their hips. They were not looking at the kneeling boy, Ekaitza could see, but they were, instead, looking quite bored.

All except one. There was a dark-haired man in a dark purple coat sitting on the hood of the car, forearms resting on his knees, speaking very quietly to the fair-haired figure kneeling on the ground. The young man, for his part, did not seem inclined to answer. That didn't surprise Ekaitza - Cor and Lissa didn't seem like the kind of people to keep disloyal company. At this distance, only a few sounds managed to drift over to the girls: _knocks_, _outsiders, pandora._

_Raven._

The words meant little to Ekaitza, but instincts told her to glance over at Cor. So that, she thought mildly, was what _if looks could kill _meant.

Cor's voice was low. "Let's go."

The dark haired man turned in their direction.

He couldn't see them.

He couldn't possibly see them.

Could he see them?

Even from this long distance, Ekaitza could tell that Thiago Wesick was smiling.

* * *

Atiena Morris could not say that she was a girl accustomed to loneliness, or boredom. Such was life as a Morris - one rush of adrenaline followed the last, a ceaseless carousel of one long hard-scrabble moment after another, everyday with a voice in her ear and someone she trusted watching her back. When she wasn't on the run, she was looking over her shoulder; when she wasn't looking over her shoulder, then the danger was usually in _front _of her.

And so far, she thought ruefully, the Selection was pretty lacking in danger. It made sense - she imagined that she and the other seventeen remaining girls were being kept much more sheltered than the rest of Demetri's subjects, cloistered in a gilded cage while he carefully picked out his queen from among their number.

It made for a nice change of pace, she supposed, but that wasn't precisely why she had decided to venture down here, so far south, so far away from the people she cared about, so removed from the cityscapes in which she was most comfortable. She had spent a sleepless night in her little assigned room on the fifth floor of the safehouse - how could she sleep, when she was thinking of her siblings, her Mama, her Killmonger, and the missions that they would be carrying out without her tonight in Tammins.

_Stay safe_, had been her last words to Maria before leaving. _I won't be around to bail you out for just a little while._

_You don't have to worry about us, Ati. _

If only that were true.

So she could not sleep, but nor could she leave the safehouse, and so her first night in the Selection was spent fitfully - she did sit-ups on the floor in front of her bed until she had entirely lost count, searched the room for bugs, flicking through the books that the king had supposedly set out for her in the room - a veteran's autobiography, she noted, and found herself wondering whether the king had a good sense of humour. After the first few chapters, she started wondering whether he maybe had a better idea of her than she had first thought.

In any case, she thought, it was better than just staring at the wall for six hours.

She had to bide her time, she thought. She would get her opportunity. Sooner or later. The more she learned about the rebels, the more she understood that she would have to work hard to work her way into their ranks. She wasn't sure that she would have trusted them if that wasn't the case; she knew that Killmonger had always said a group was only as secure as its membership requirements. And Atiena could afford to wait. After all, her priority wasn't the king - although it was a nice perk, she would not deny.

And so Atiena spent her first night in the Selection safehouse.

Biding her time.

When the sun rose, she could not bear to sit about sleepless any longer, and stood, and dressed, and made her way outside - anything for a glimpse of the sky and a breath of fresh air. Privately, she found herself hoping that there would be some guards hanging about, preparing breakfast, or transporting the king to the safehouse, or, well, _doing_something.

She was not disappointed. Just on the other side of the white picket fence that encircled the safehouse - a small touch that Atiena still found slightly hilarious, like something Daniel would come up with, a fenced-off garden in the middle of nowhere - there was a flurry of activity as the stoves were hauled out of a truck once more and the rebels set about making breakfast in a slight frenzy. Uzohola had told them that they would be served breakfast in their rooms. Atiena thought it was meant to be something of a consolation for the sudden mass elimination the night before, but the idea of staying trapped within those four walls for even another minute seemed like a sort of hell to her at the moment, so instead she leaned against the safehouse wall, and watched Wickanninish Harjo and his team shovel fistfuls of bacon onto the stove, and watched the first birds of the morning flit across the white-and-pink sky that was dawning, clear and bright.

The rebels seemed at ease around one another, moving sleepily around one another, joking quietly between themselves, passing parcels of food back and forth and teasing one another. Watching them made her feel even more homesick. Swift and Mouse would be at home here, playing an imagined hide-and-chase game among the trucks; she could imagine Sanji and Maria among them, laughing and inspecting their weapons; she could picture Killmonger watching them all from the sidelines, keeping them safe like he always did. The Morrises were their own peope, Atiena thought, but she could see the appeal of the Kingdom in Exile. They seemed a rough, sharp, feral lot, but they had each other.

There was a lot to be said for finding your pack.

She wasn't eavesdropping, she would have objected to that label quite vehemently, she wasn't eavesdropping, but she was also content to sit on the windowsill and breathe in fresh air, and listen to the general shape of their conversation. The king had ordered his first two dates, she heard. Her name did not seem to be among those chosen.

A few of the rebels looked over in Atiena's direction, but she did not say anything, and after a few moments of curiosity, neither did they. She was grateful for that. She wondered what they had been told about her. What they knew about her. What they thought about her. She could not help but wonder: did she look like a queen-to-be?

Or did she still, as she suspected, look like a soldier?

The door next to her swung open, and one of the members of the inner circle stepped out, and squinted at the sky like it had personally offended him, and set a lighter to his lips, and though his eyes skated across Atiena, he seemed inclined to simply accept her presence as he lowered his hands and exhaled past his cigarette, running one hand through his already dishevelled hair.

They stood in silence, Atiena reclined against the window, watching the breakfast being made, Täj watching the sky and smoking. Atiena appreciated that. The Kingdom in Exile was a quiet kingdom, she thought, its people prone to silence rather than idle chatter. She could see herself being happy in this sort of environment - happy, provided the rest of the Morrises were here with her, and happy here, as well. She loved her younger siblings but sometimes there was just so much _chatter_.

And there was something about Täj that reminded Atiena so strongly of the older brother that she called Lethal, like it was the same bones lying underneath, the same arteries tangled within. She almost couldn't help herself; she uttered her first words in over two days: "You're up early." And it _was _still early - if she had to guess, it couldn't be later than half past four in the morning. And unlike the others, Täj didn't seem to have anything to _do_.

"I have to go kill a man."

Atiena wasn't sure if he was joking or not.

His tone suggested he wasn't.

A cloud of dust had appeared on the horizon. Täj and Atiena watched it approach with detached interest. It was, for once, not a truck but a car - a low Dodge Charger with its hood missing, all of its engine components open to the morning air. It pulled up, and a man with long dark hair leaned out of it. To her surprise, Atiena realised that she recognised him - Theo Malone, she thought, from Hansport. He had accompanied Atiena and Evangeline Khan down to the Wastelands two days ago. They had taken the train across the country, and jumped off the back about six miles outside of the Paloma border. He had been quiet enough. Inoffensive, Atiena thought. Again - there was something to be said for someone who knew when to be quiet.

Theo Malone said, "someone wanted a car?"

Atiena looked at Täj.

In answer, he held out his pack of cigarettes towards her. She shook her head, and said, almost apologetically, "I don't smoke."

Täj dropped his tab, and extinguished it with his heel. "Don't start," he said wryly, and caught the keys that the long-haired rebel threw in his direction as they crossed paths. Into the car, and away he went again.

He was a good driver, Killmonger would have said. He drove like he had a death wish.

Atiena watched the car go, and wondered who was going to die. It was such a beautiful, pale, crisp morning. The air was only just beginning to warm. There were still lizards darting across the sand in search of a place to sleep.

"That," Theo Malone said, his voice almost admiring, "Is the most I've ever heard him say in one conversation."

He looked at Atiena rather suspiciously.

"Well," Atiena said simply. "I guess I'm special."

She pushed off the wall, hopped the fence in a single seamless motion, and went to see if she could steal a bread roll from the rebels cooking around the stove.

* * *

**Yay! Our seventh chapter in seven days. I hope you guys are enjoying this as much as I am! Our viewpoint characters in this chapter were _Ekaitza Jones _and _Atiena Morris_****. I hope you enjoyed seeing the world through their eyes!**

**Please do let me know what you thought - I have been absolutely overwhelmed with gratitude for every single review so far. I really love hearing what you like and don't like, and what you would like to see more of. I really appreciate absolutely any and all feedback you can give me.**

**Thanks so much. I hope you enjoyed!**

**\- Izar**


	8. O, Sons, Forget Your Fathers

**Chapter Eight: O, Sons, Forget Your Fathers**

* * *

_With the malevolent wings, the meridians of death, I have seen you - at the gallows,  
You have killed again. As always. As your fathers killed. As the animals killed._

\- Salvatore Quasimodo

* * *

Yue Yukimura did not expect to see the King in Exile when she stepped outside of the safehouse in the early hours of that afternoon.

Saran had passed her a note in the sitting room earlier that day to say that Uzohola had promised them a walk down into the ruins of the town below, if they wanted to stretch their legs and glimpse the sky, for just a few moments. Uzohola had approved four girls for such an expedition: Saran Altai. Corvina Rouen. Ekaitza Jones. Yue Yukimura. Almost without noticing, the four had become a kind of unit. Yue would have to be blind not to see that Cor probably had something to do with it, but if she was totally honest with herself, she had to admit that she craved such a bond, no matter how artificial. When you were raised in such a cloistered, cold serenity, any breach of the same represented a total upheaval of all you had once known.

And if anything was a breach, then King Demetri Dunin, second of his name, Lord Paramount of the Illéan Territories, qualified as a total rupture of the same. Like all that had held Yue firm had abruptly torn, and left her falling, spinning, adrift.

He was standing where Täj usually did, leaning against the white picket fence around the safehouse, looking up at its darkened windows like if he could just look beyond them, then all the answers he so desired might be laid bare. That was the first thing that Yue noticed: his gaze. His eyes, to be more precise: a perfect green, too deep and whole to be compared to mere emeralds, what her father would have called _ao _rather than _midori_, the green of natural and wholesome things: a tree in new spring bloom, grass springing back underfoot, moss creeping gradually across the face of some abandoned structure. Jewel tones, thought Yue, not shallow glossy green.

The second thing she noticed was the sheer, awful damage that had been done to the face in which those eyes were set. His right brow and orbit were just receding from an obvious swelling, the colour fading from a dark charcoal nearest his lashes to a pale violet brushing his brows, a dark green spreading outwards towards his temple, a much more nasueasous shade than the colour of his eyes. A small set of stitches, no larger than the thumbnail of a baby, had been placed quite delicately along his left eye, a small well of yellow pus pulsing beneath. His lower lip was swollen and split and stained a nasty dark red, like spilt wine had sunk in along the tissue. His right cheekbone, usually so sharply defined in images, had disappeared beneath a sunken and bruised mass of tissue.

And yet, those eyes.

Like she was cut adrift when they fixed on her.

She had expected her heart to beat faster. Instead, it just felt hollow, and light, and almost entirely absent, like the space beneath her ribs was entirely empty.

"Good morning, Lady Yue," Demetri said. His voice was as smooth and warm as it sounded on the Report, even coming out of that ruined mouth, burst lip and swollen philtrum and all.

"...your Majesty." Yue dipped herself, quite poisedly, into a curtsy. "It is an absolute honour..."

"I didn't expect to meet anyone." Demetri looked like he would have smiled, if it wouldn't further jeopardise the healing of his split lip. His eyes did the smiling for him. "Here, I mean. I didn't mean to disturb any of you."

"You aren't disturbing anyone, your Majesty."

Demetri looked like he doubted that very much. "Even so. I am sorry our first meeting must occur..." He paused, and brushed a thumb across the worst of the bruising on his zygomatic. "Under these circumstances."

Yue didn't mind.

But she could not hold her mind back from spinning new threads of thought, wondering - what, exactly, had happened? How had a king found himself in a situation where this kind of damage could be done? Who exactly had been on the other end of the fist, the knife, the... whatever had happened here?

He didn't seem inclined to offer any answers, so Yue did not ask any questions.

"I am glad," she said softly. "That our first meeting _has _occurred, your Majesty."

Demetri's eyes threatened to outshine the bright desert sun. "As am I, Lady Yue. And may I say, you look absolutely beautiful." She blushed - if she had at all predicted that she might run into the king, she thought she might have chosen something a little more elegant and flattering than a pale pink skirt and white blouse that left her olive skin bare at her shoulders, across her collarbones. Such a casual outfit, for her first meeting with the king. She was wearing _sandals_. "How are you finding the Selection so far?"

Yue paused, and turned her words over in her mouth like a mint before she spoke. "I did not know what to expect, your Majesty, but I am finding it to be a most interesting experience. The other girls here have been wonderful company to me, and the Court in Exile most excellent hosts."

Demetri ran his thumb along his lower lip, and did not wince as his nail scraped against the wound that lay there. "Lady Yue, you have a way with words." Yue almost flinched. Why did those kind words sound like a criticism? "Are you enjoying yourself?"

"I am, your Majesty, so far."

"Nothing else we can get you?"

"No, your Majesty, nothing at all."

Demetri tilted his head as a bird might, his green eyes bright and inquisitive. "Did you like the books I chose for you?" It was such an honest question, and asked with such a heart-felt curiosity, that Yue felt her heart lighten in that peculiar way once again.

Yue spoke softly. "They were absolutely perfect, your Majesty."

"You hadn't read them before?"

Yue hesitated, before she decided that truth was probably her friend in this situation. "Yes, your Majesty. I read _Anna Karenina _when I was young. But it's an old favorite, so I was glad to read it again. I find it a comfort, truth be told."

"I have always believed Tolstoy to be one of the true old greats. Such a way with words: _h__e stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking. _If only that man could bring himself to write a happy ending, he might be my favorite author. Fitzgerald was the same, married to misery. Or do you prefer tragedies, Lady Yue?"

The way he looked at her, Yue could believe that he wanted to hear what she had to say. She could not help it; the words spilled out of her. "Tragedies, your Majesty? No, your Majesty. I always believed stories are these... little perfect microcosms of hopeful thinking, a tiny crafted world in which we learn to love these... flawed yet flawless characters. They may go through tragic events but I have always thought that at the very least that hope should shine through at the end. Even in some small way." She paused. "Your Majesty."

"So I suppose you prefer a Jane Austen sort of tale?"

"They're sweet and light, your Majesty, I like them well enough."

"But your favorite author, if you had to choose?"

Yue paused. "I don't think I've found one yet."

Demetri smiled, despite his split lip, and the world was bright. "Please let me know if you do, Lady Yue. I am always looking for recommendations. I have plenty of time to read in exile."

The door to the safehouse swung open. Uzohola was framed in the threshold there, looking as elegant as she ever did with her hair wrapped up in a blue silk turban, dressed in a waistcoat and suit trousers to match, her black shoes gleaming in the orange sunshine like an oil slick on an abandoned highway lit by street lamps. "Your Majesty," she called. The term of respect sounded somehow foreign in her mouth. Her dark skin was very bright in the warm afternoon light. "We're ready for you now."

Yue had almost forgotten that he was here for a date with another girl. They had announced it in the sitting room the night before, at the same time as the eliminations: the first date, with Liara Lee, a willowy girl with dark hair and dark eyes and a father loyal to the false queen Ysabel. The second date, with Vardi Tayna, the small, waspish girl who rarely left the room next to Yue's, and played music at almost all hours. Yue couldn't say it hadn't been a disappointment not to hear her own name announced, but this conversation with the king, short as it had been, had been more than enough to entirely dispel any sorrow.

"Thank you, Uzohola." Demetri straightened and tugged at his jacket to straighten it. Yue had almost failed to notice how he was dressed - a navy blazer over a crisp, clean white shirt, almost blinding under this southern sun, white as the snow at home, white as a new sketchbook page unspoiled by the stain of ink or charcoal. He had a pin just above his breast pocket: the seal of the rebellion. Was Yue imagining it, or did he seem a little ill at ease dressed like this? He was utterly relaxed as he stopped and glanced back at Yue, like he had just remembered something interesting. "Oh, Lady Yue. Have you ever read anything by the poet, Nizar Qabbani?"

"Qabbani, your Majesty? No, your Majesty."

"Well, if you'd like, I could arrange to lend you my collection of his work. I think you might like it - and if you don't, I'd love to hear why not the next time we happen to meet." Demetri moved away from the fence. "Hopefully in more ideal circumstances."

"That would be... absolutely perfect, your Majesty."

"It was lovely to meet you, Lady Yue."

Yue watched as Demetri moved lightly up the steps to offer Uzohola a ginger embrace ("careful now, ribs still broken, Uzo") and the two disappeared into the safehouse for Demetri's first date.

Yue found herself hoping he had a wonderful time on that date, even if it wasn't with her.

* * *

"Lady Liara."

Liara glanced over at the door, and, seeing the co-ordinator Uzohola at the entrance to the music room, rose respectfully from the low stool at the old grand piano. Her greeting died in her throat as she realised that there was a man with Uzohola, tall and lean, shoulders a little broader than the rest of the his frame, like he was still waiting to grow into them. And yet it seemed that the concept of awkwardness was wholly foreign to him, and it was not unless Liara had been scanning him for every physical aspect that she could see that she landed upon these flaws, minor though they were.

"Your Majesty. Ms Ndlovukazi." Liara had not seen any of the rebels adopt the usual formal protocols of the royal court - curtsies and bows and titles and the rest - but she knew that if Demetri wanted to claim the throne of Illéa, he couldn't much protest if she acted as one ought to around the heir to the throne of Illéa. So she lowered herself into a neat curtsey aimed at the man who was calling himself Demetri, and lowered her gaze to the ground.

"Lady Liara." Demetri's voice held only the ghost of an Angeles accent - just enough to make him sound sophisticated to the ears of one was unaccustomed to what a real king or queen sounded like. Truth be told, though his voice was smooth and even and pleasant to the ear, Liara found it difficult to discern any distinguishing characteristics from how he spoke. No heavy accent marred his words. "May I just say what an absolute pleasure it is to see you." His green eyes skated across the room and settled on Liara, cool and steady. "Again, I should say."

Liara nodded, and Demetri moved across the room. He gestured to one of the armchairs beside the bookshelves ("please, won't you sit down?") and waited for Liara to settle herself very carefully on the plush cover before he sat down himself. To her surprise and suspicion, Uzohola did not excuse herself, but remained standing by the door, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes fixed immovingly on her shoes. Wickaninnish Harjo, the rebel who had escorted Liara to the music room about a half hour earlier and whispered a hasty good luck to her, had similarly retreated to stand beside the coordinator, his rifle slung low across his shoulder

For Liara's safety, she wondered, or for Demetri's?

"How are you settling in?" Liara stared at Demetri. She had known it would not be as simple as meeting him - just seeing him, just glimpsing his face, just hearing his voice - but somehow a tiny wave of disappointment still rose under her ribs as she traced his features with her gaze. It had been fifteen years. She had known she would not be meeting Demetri as he had been - a fair-haired six year old with intelligent eyes and the slightest stutter, prone to long moments of melancholy and thoughtfulness that was probably nothing more than a young boy attempting to imitate the gravitas of his royal father. And yet, coming face to face with a stranger was disorientating nonetheless. The injuries that had been done to his face meant little. Liara wasn't sure she would have been able to identify much even if he had been totally whole and unblemished. He was any young man, from any family.

Clearly, she thought, it wouldn't be that easy.

She shrugged. "It's fine, your Majesty."

"Only fine?"

"It's very early days. I can't say I've entirely made up my mind about this whole process just yet."

"You sound very skeptical, Lady Liara." There was no familiarity there in his voice, no warmth, no friendliness. He held himself so _formally_, she thought, like she was more a threat than a childhood friend.

Was she a threat? Could she be?

She had a note from the false prince Mordred in her pocket, threatening to burn a hole through her skirt. She had _left _a note for the false prince Mordred in the palace, a single promise etched within: _I'll find you the truth_. Liara Lee had her flaws, but she never broke a promise. She never had. She did not intend to break a promise now. And she had made a promise to the false prince Mordred.

Was she a threat?

The real threats here were standing by the door. Her life would be in danger if either Uzohola or Wick had any idea of her true intention. She knew that she could not allow that to happen.

"Well," Liara replied. "No change there, your Majesty."

If he realised that was the slightest test, his face betrayed no indication. "I don't remember you being a cynical child, Lady Liara. That always seemed to be _my _role, if I recall correctly." That was true. Demetri had always been much more cautious and fatalistic than the others. Liara had been the leader, the one to come up with the reckless ideas, the best adventures. Mordred had been at once her most trusted lieutenant, and an absolute wildcard - and that second part was still very much true. Unpredictable didn't begin to describe it. Liara had not truly become so aloof until after Demetri's disappearance. Mordred's cruelty, similarly, had come later. In the aftermath.

"A matter of perspective, I suppose."

"Perhaps." A long silence persisted. "Do you wish to return to the court, Lady Liara?"

"...to return, your Majesty?" Was this so-called date truly just a dressed-up elimination process? Had they learned something? Was that why Uzohola and Wick were waiting by the door, to escort her out, to carry out some sort of execution? They had eliminated seventeen girls before Demetri had even encountered them. Liara knew her presence was a constant concern for the rebels, and that her use as a propaganda symbol would wane with every day that passed. They would be able to exploit the simple fact that she had voluntarily defected to the rebellion for as much propaganda and morale as they pleased - what was her continued participation in the Selection worth?

"I worry, Lady Liara, that this place might be too far removed from that to which you are accustomed. That you might be uncomfortable here, in the south, in the sun, in... more rustic accommodations. I know, when I first arrived here, it seemed a whole other world. Your comfort is my absolute priority."

"How long did it take you to settle in," Liara asked. "When you first arrived here, Demetri?" The name slipped out almost naturally. She blanched. "Your Majesty, I mean. My apologies, your Majesty. I meant to say..."

He waved off her apologies. "Please, don't worry. An easy mistake to make among old friends - although, if you try to call me _Demmy_ as you used to, we may need to have words." He flashed a brief smile that stetched his split lip wide. "When I first arrived, Lady Liara, I had a great many advantages to help me settle in very quickly. A wonderful group of friends. Caretakers who looked after me very well. The best mentor I could have asked for."

"A mentor, your Majesty?"

"General Klahan." Demetri said it like he was describing the weather, but Liara wanted to twist her skirt into knots in her hands at the mention of the man's name. The General. The military mind of the Kingdom in Exile. The man that Mordred had killed.

The man who had taken Demetri.

"A very great man," Demetri said of the man who had stolen everything from him. "A very great leader. And a fantastic father."

A father? Demetri had a father. Trajan had been a good man. Liara had seen for herself that the stories about Trajan were not mere propaganda - though he had kept an entire kingdom on his shoulders, he would always have the time to give Liara a small smile and pluck a flower from a nearby bush to place lightly in her hair, ruffle Mordred's hair gently, ask Demetri how his day was going, like he was an adult, like his voice mattered. Liara had wished, when she was young, that Trajan was her father, rather than Commander Lee. She wanted Demetri and Mordred to be her brothers, to protect her, to play with her, and to never leave her. She wanted Ysabel, kind and poised and elegant, to be her mother, and dote on her, and braid her hair before bed.

General Klahan had reminded Liara of her own father sometimes. There was a harshness there, an edge beneath the skin. She had not found it such a great sin that Mordred had killed him.

Now, sitting across from Demetri, she wondered about that.

"I hope his children are doing well," Liara said. "His death must have been such a shock to them. Mordred..."

Demetri cut her off quickly. "His daughter is doing just fine, thank you. I will pass your condolences on to her when I can."

A long silence hung between them. Demetri didn't inclined to speak further. How could that be, Liara wondered. How could he sit across from the only person in the world who simultaneously knew who he had been, before he was taken, and did not want to put his head on a spike, and have nothing to say? Liara had gone over so many stories in her head, little anecdotes that were funny only their adult selves after many years had elapsed - the time she had fallen out of a tree in the palace gardens and Demetri had dislocated his shoulder trying to catch her, the time Mordred had talked them into sneaking into the throne room in the middle of the night to try on the king's crown and spin the sceptre like a cheerleader's baton, the time Ysabel had set up a picnic on the palace roof for the children of the court so that they could see the fireworks commemorating the tenth anniversary of the king's coronation shatter the Angeles sky into a thousand vivid colourful shards. Liara had gone over every detail. Ready to ask. Ready to _talk_.

Did he not want to speak about it? Or did he not remember them, because he was not Demetri?

"Your Majesty," she began - a breach of protocol, _do not speak unless spoken to_, but she couldn't force herself to hold it back much longer. She was interrupted abruptly by Uzohola, who stepped forward, looking at her watch.

"Your Majesty? My apologies. Administer Givre will be expecting you."

Demetri nodded, and rose from his seat before Liara could even process what Uzohola's words meant. "Of course. Lady Liara, I had a wonderful time."

"That's _it?_ Your Majesty, that was barely fifteen minutes..."

"That's all I have time for."

"Demetri, _please_." Liara could not hold back the words. They spilled from her, a tsunami. "I know you know who I am. I can see it in your eyes. So why..."

"Thank you for your time, Lady Liara."

Demetri gestured, and Uzohola snapped open the door. Wick was still keeping his gaze fixed on the ground in front of him. Was he looking _sorry _for Liara? Her pride faltered. How could the king treat her like this? How could her old friend treat her like this?

Unless he was hiding something.

And yet he had spoken so much like the Demetri she had known.

She watched him go, and said nothing further, only inclined her head politely as Demetri glanced back to say a final goodbye, though her nerves were dancing with anger and frustration.

A small part of her still wished her old friend was still alive, and walking out of the music room right now.

The most rational part of her was scared of what would happen if he truly was.

* * *

True to form, for their first date, Demetri brought Vardi Tayna to an execution.

She was standing in the desert when he arrived, about three miles west of the safehouse like she had tried to run, head tilted away from the sun, arms folded, scuffing the sand with the side of her shoe. Somehow she managed to look even more murderous when she caught sight of him. It felt strange, Demetri thought, to see her like this - him in borrowed clothes with his bruises half-healed, her in a short skirt and her hair wound up into a neat knot at the nape of her neck. She walked over towards the car as he slid out of it, and he watched her eyes darken as they took in the thorough devastation that had been done to his face.

"So," Vardi Tayna said darkly. "Who am I killing?"

Demetri laughed and gently pushed her hands away as she went to touch the stitches. "Fuck's sake, Vardi Tayna, it's not that bad."

"You look like a _cadaver_, Dimusha."

"So, better than usual?"

"That's not difficult." There was the slightest smile in her voice, but her eyes had not lost their serious, angry look. She didn't seem inclined to push the issue, however, because at Demetri's words she had lowered her hands and now she slipped one thumb through Demetri's belt loop and looked up at him. Demetri wasn't tall. Vardi Tayna was just tiny. Wick always joked that was why Thiago liked to stand next to her when he wanted to seem intimidating. "You taking me out someplace nice, darling?"

Demetri rolled his eyes, but could not stop the edges of his mouth from turning upwards. "Let's keep those expectations low, sweetheart."

"With you? Always."

He pushed her away, laughing a little, and she did not resist but stepped away from him, laughing, her eyes bright. Demetri hadn't realised until this moment how much he had missed her. Vardi Tayna had been quarantined from the inner circle and cloistered amongst the rest of the Selection for over a week now, which shouldn't have seemed like much - in the past, she had frequently disappeared on spy missions for longer, and with almost no notice, but, Demetri thought, there was something nastier about the sheer proximity of it all: knowing Vardi Tayna was sleeping in the same building as Täj and Wick and forbidden to speak to them, knowing that she had been cautioned not to look Demetri in the eye or speak to him before being spoken to, realising that she was expected to stay in the safehouse and act as a stranger to the rebels that catered to the Selection's every whim.

"Get in the car," Demetri said. "We'll be late."

Vardi Tayna looked very suspicious, but she did as she was told. Most unlike her, Demetri mused, but he followed her and had to immediately slap at Vardi Tayna's boots as she put them up on the dash. "Shoes down, this is a rental."

"A _rental_?" Vardi Tayna looked enormously doubtful. "Demusha. It's one of Malone's shitty Mazdas."

"And you're getting dust all over the dashboard."

Vardi Tayna laughed and straightened up, instead setting her elbow on the edge of the car window and leaning her head on her hand as Demetri started up the car again. He was a careful driver - someone who grew up with Täj was bound to be. The only person who willingly got into a car with the pale man anymore was Vardi Tayna, who herself had totaled so many vehicles in their childhood that Thiago had issued a general edict that she wasn't to be allowed back behind the wheel until she had paid for each car and truck with a new informant or some valuable piece of information. She was, Demetri understood, not yet paid up on that front.

Demetri, on the other hand, was widely denigrated by the others as overtly cautious, too slow, unduly hesitant. His father had taught him the most elementary aspects of driving, not the General or some other rebel with a need to get from A to B as quickly as possible and very very little to lose. His father had been a good driver, a safe driver. Demetri had never shaken some of his habits. Uzohola had despaired of travelling with him when they were young. "_Nkosana yami_, my princeling," she would say on long journeys, quite sadly, leaning forward between the two front seats from her habitual position in the back. "If you insist on driving like this, our new kingdom will be dust by the time we get where we're going."

Vardi Tayna, at least, didn't seem inclined to complain. She was watching Demetri closely, her gaze tracing the shape of his bruises, his cuts, the new stitches beside his eye that looked due to be removed. She had a way of looking at you that made you feel like there were hooks going through your skin. She was looking at Demetri like that now.

"What?"

"I didn't say anything."

"You're _looking_."

She shrugged. "I am." Her lips twitched. "Would you rather I didn't?"

Demetri looked over at her and smiled. How had ever managed to befriend a girl who insisted on being so... unfriendly? "And Täj tells me you're having difficulty making friends in the Selection. _Quelle surprise_." He wondered if Liara had friends in the Selection. He found it hard to imagine that Yue did not.

"I already _have _friends." She said it like it was obvious. That was a very Vardi Tayna answer, Demetri thought. Sometimes he thought she would be happy to live in a mostly empty world, just space to move and things to see and maybe one or two of the inner circle at her side if she was feeling sociable. Now, Vardi Tayna sounded darkly amused. "They're fucking idiots, but you know, no one's perfect."

"They are," Demetri agreed. "Idiots."

He swerved around a pothole where a landmine had once laid, and shifted gears as the reached the hills and started to climb. Vardi Tayna said, "how have you been?", and Demetri gestured to his face and said, "can't you see?", and Vardi Tayna said, "that isn't what I meant", and Demetri replied, "you tell me, seems like everyone knows what's going on in my life better than I do", and Vardi Tayna frowned and said, "you can't blame other people just because you're unobservant" and Demetri snapped, without looking at her, "they eliminated _seventeen people_" and Vardi Tayna said, a note of wry amusement in her face, "there was only one working shower, they needed to go", and Demetri said, "before I even _met _them, Vee?" and Vardi Tayna just shrugged and said "yeah, that was pretty shit" and Demetri couldn't help but laugh at just how _simple _she made it all seem.

"Don't swear in front of your king, Lady Vardi."

"_Lady Vardi_." She sounded like she wanted to vomit the words rather than simply say them.

Demetri just laughed.

"It was," he agreed. "Pretty shit."

They pulled up and slid out of the car. Demetri pointed to the crest of the hill, and without needing an explanation, Vardi Tayna started to walk. Demetri fell into step beside her, and, quite spontaneously, said, "so apparently I actually went through the windshield when we crashed."

Vardi Tayna coughed out the kind of laugh that only ever follows the misfortune of a friend and said, "what do you mean _apparently_? You don't _remember_?"

"I hit the ground _hard_, Vardi Tayna."

"Could you imagine? All these years of hunting and chasing and running and you get done in by a car crash?"

"I'd almost be okay with it," Demetri said. "Just to see Ysabel's face."

At the edge of the hill, they came to a plateau that overlooked a small valley below, the kind of sheltered, shadowed space in which the Kingdom in Exile did its bloodiest work. Demetri watched Vardi Tayna's face very closely as she looked down into the valley, and saw the men gathered there - two with golden hair, one with dark hair.

One so pale as to be wrought from mist and ghostlight.

The dark-haired man was already dead. Pandora operatives always carried poison. The pale man would bury him with the rest.

Watching the way Vardi Tayna's eyes softened, for the shortest second, looking down into that valley, Demetri wondered if it was a vain delusion to think that any of the girls in the Selection would ever look at him like that. Even, like this, for a second.

Vardi Tayna didn't stay soft for long."It could have been worse."

Demetri looked at her. The words hung in the otherwise empty air, sharp and harsh. Vardi Tayna didn't seem to know how to blunt the most abrasive of her edges. Or maybe she knew she didn't have to, when she was with Demetri.

"What do you mean?"

"The elimination." Vardi Tayna set her jaw. "None of the women here want to marry you. They want to marry the _king_. They want to marry Demetri Dunin, heir to Illéa. They want to marry the crown. They couldn't give a shit about you, Demusha."

"What about you, Vardi Tayna?"

"I don't give a shit about you either."

"Really." The ghost of a laugh in her voice.

"Never have." For the briefest moment, she was not Vardi Tayna, the dark-haired wraith, Thiago's favourite little bird, and confidant to the king, but the little girl she had been when Demetri had first met her, no older than six or seven, and as feral as a child could be, all dirt and blood, arteries dripping from between her teeth, just looking for her next meal, just looking for someplace to sleep, craving a kind word. Demetri remembered her as a single dark-haired girl in a sea of blonde boys, the single Daughter among the Sons of the Rebellion, and recalled how she had pressed a slice of bread into his hand and widened her eyes dramatically to indicate he should eat it quickly, before it was stolen by some other hungry orphan. His first words to her had been, "my parents just died" and the little girl had made a face and said, quite exasperatedly, "join the club, _ese_" and the General, then a cold and cruel stranger to Demetri, motives and motivations unknown, had been unable to hold back and had laughed so loud it had made Demetri jump.

"I find that," Demetri said. _I don't give a shit about you_. "Very hard to believe."

Below them, there was a loud crack and the first man dropped. Täj stepped over his body as the second man realised what was about to happen, and began to struggle against his ties. Vardi Tayna was still looking down, her gaze still fixed on the pale man. Demetri rather thought the sky could have shattered around her, shedding stars like so many dropped coins, threads of dying light unspooling in piles around her, and she still would not have looked away.

Demetri did not bother to hold back his question. There were few people he could be unguarded around. There were still fewer that he could demand the truth from. "Why?"

"What do you mean?"

She knew what he meant. She wanted him to ask her.

"Why do you join the Selection, Vee?"

"Why do you want to know?"

Her response was so absurd it almost made him laugh. "I think I already do."

She had folded her arms. Her eyes were shadowed from lack of sleep, her face drawn and pale. She did not answer.

"The General," Demetri said. "Before he died. What did he tell you?"

Vardi Tayna was silent.

"The General," Demetri said again. "Why did he tell you to enter?"

"What man doesn't want his daughter to be a queen?" Her voice was very soft. It had been weeks since the General's death. Demetri still hadn't seen her cry. Maybe she never would. When she was upset, or stressed, or angry, Vardi Tayna's voice had a way of tightening that made it sound like she was speaking with a noose around her throat. "What girl doesn't want to marry a prince?" Was that grief choking her, or a strangling lie? "The General didn't tell me to enter."

"You're _lying_ -"

"I think you're being paranoid, Demusha."

"I think," Demetri said, a little distantly. "I'm being observant." He paused. "If _you _wanted to marry the prince, you would have said yes the first time he asked you."

Somewhere beyond the edge of the world, a coyote was howling. It was a long, low, plaintive sound. The wind stirred Vardi Tayna's hair, very gently, just enough to make it seem like the sky was trying to give voice to some small fear, whisper some warning into their ears, as they looked down at the king's executioner going about his business. Täj had walked over to the second man. He had not seen Vardi Tayna and Demetri on the hill above him. They did not look at one another. They stood apart.

The sun was sinking quickly. Vardi Tayna's voice was almost sad. "First?"

"What?"

"You said _first_." Vardi Tayna's hair silhouetted her face, a beautiful study in contrasts between shadow and relief. "The _first_ time he asked me."

"I did."

"Not," Vardi Tayna said, very softly. "The _only _time."

Below them, another man fell.

Demetri said, his voice very low, "let's keep those expectations low, sweetheart."


	9. If He's Going To Stay

Chapter Nine: If He's Going To Stay

* * *

_Why don't you ask him who's the latest on his throne?_  
_Don't say that you love me, just tell me that you want me._

\- Lindsey Buckingham

* * *

"...nononono, that's not all, and _then_ he asked me if I'd ever heard of this poet, Nizar Qabbani?" Yue's eyes darted about the group, looking like she was very much expecting them to respond _wait, you didn't know who Nizar Qabbani was? What kind of an idiot are you? _She had been smiling when Saran and the others came out of the safehouse to meet her, and she had not stopped smiling since. It was so lovely to see, and yet Saran could not quell the slight heaviness in her heart as she realised that Demetri had taken the time to chat and laugh with the other northern girl, despite carefully avoiding everyone else up until now. Was there something special about Yue, something bright that drew the eye, something more attractive than the others?

Did Saran care? It hadn't been her idea to join. It had been her grandfather's. Did she really want Demetri to pay attention to her?

Or was it just the fact that she didn't know _why_ he wasn't paying attention to her?

She thought that was probably it. That had to be it. She hoped that was it. Yue was an absolute sweetheart - the last thing Saran wanted was for some idle chatter about books and poetry to drive a wedge between her and the first burgeoning friendship she had found in this strange Selection. Saran had never wanted to marry the king, but it wasn't the nicest feeling to realise that the king clearly didn't want to marry _you_.

"Nizar Qabbani?" Saran's nose wrinkled as she thought carefully, distracting herself from the vague stirring feelings of inadequacy with the question of literature. "Did he write _Elegy for a Woman of No Importance_?" Maybe it had been some sort of a veiled insult. She didn't want to think that Demetri was the type to do so, but the truth was, she had no idea what kind of man the King of Dust was. Maybe he was cruel. Maybe he was thoughtless. _When she died, no face turned pale, no lips trembled; no eyes followed the coffin to the end of the road..._

Maybe he just genuinely liked the poetry, and didn't know how an overprotective Saran would try her damnedest to interpret it. She almost laughed at the idea. She was _definitely_reading too much into this.

"I don't know." Yue sighed. "Maybe he did? I've never heard of him before. Oh, I'm sure I came across as such an _idiot_."

"Did you behave like yourself?" Ekaitza's voice was sharp and blunt, and cut through all else. Like a brick through a delicate crystal window, Saran thought amusedly. Ekaitza did not stand on ceremony. It was refreshing, sometimes, and immensely aggravating, other times. Today, she was tending towards the former, but moments like this hinted at the latter.

"...I think so?" Yue's shoulder hunched forward a little bit as the quartet of girls following the dirt path down into the ruins of the town. Quite bizarrely, Saran thought, a thin finger of smoke was rising from one of the destroyed chimneys, which lay at a forty degree angle to the ground, so that the smoke came out horizontally and had to be swiftly redirected upwards by the window. Other than that, there were no signs of life - she had rather hoped to see some of the rebels. One rebel in particular? She almost smiled to herself. Behave yourself, she thought. Don't forget why you're here. "Are you going to tell me that was a mistake?"

Ekaitza shrugged and pinched her fingers very close together. "Just a _little _one." They passed what might have once been a bakery, a clay oven collapsed into a larger pile of bricks, a bread-shaped sign half-hidden beneath burned rafters. The entire place was a ghost town, like they were walking through the skeleton of a village. This cobblestoned street had been its spine - the collapsed spire of a cathedral, here, a cross that had once touched the sky and now barely rose beyond even Saran's shoulder, had been its heart. "But yeah. A mistake."

"_Ekaitza_!" Saran didn't try to hold back how she felt - she clearly sounded scandalised. "Yue, being yourself is _never _a mistake."

"Well," Ekaitza began, but was cut off by the other northern girl very quickly.

"_Never_," Saran said again, quite firmly. Was she channeling Naran right now? She thought she was. Her twin always knew exactly the right thing to say - when to stand and fight, when to gracefully concede defeat. Saran was perhaps a little too quick to jump to the _graceful concession _stage. Maybe having a pseudo little sister like this was going to be good for her, she thought, looking at Yue. "Unless you're Ekaitza, of course. I think we could rather do with her being someone else for a little while."

Saran was glad to see Ekaitza's mouth twitch at this pronouncement. It was, Saran was sure, very tough to insult the younger Baffin girl, but friends were few and far between in the Wastelands, and she didn't want to risk any of them by presuming a closeness that wasn't yet there. They were, after all, all in competition with one another, for a very great prize indeed - and Yue had apparently just made a very important play. Or maybe she hadn't. In this Selection, everything seemed very murky and complicated indeed. So far, Yue and Ekaitza were, on the other hand, blessedly simple.

"You know what?" Ekaitza said. "Altai might be right." She shrugged. "I'm just saying. If the prince wanted a nice, sweet girl like Yue here... I don't know why he included us two." She gestured to Corvina and herself. "And if he wanted girls like us, well, I'm sure there are plenty of rebel girls that fit the bill he could have married in the last fifteen years. If you ask me, I'm not exactly sure this king of ours knows what he's looking for."

"Keep your voice down." Saran's eyes darted about, searching for minders or watchers or guards in the shadows.

Yue was shaking her head. "Matters of the heart," she said softly. "Aren't just a..." She paused. "A calculation of preferences and types. Maybe he doesn't know what he's looking for. I don't think that's a bad thing."

"Maybe," Ekaitza said. "Or maybe they're just keeping us here for propaganda purposes, and he's picked his favourite on day one, and they're just spinning their wheels to keep this looking like a proper Selection."

It wouldn't have been a day out with Ekaitza Jones, Saran thought amusedly, without at least one very dark conspiracy theory spouted in the first ten minutes. She was a constant fount of them - Saran's personal favourite was the idea that the crown prince had been killed and his corpse preserved in the permafrost of the northern provinces so that they could recover DNA from his form should his replacement's claim be tested ("that's why establishing the Kingdom in Exile in the north was so important, my grandda reckons, that's why they sent Devery up there to take control so quick").

"Just you wait," Ekaitza added. "Bet you more than anything it'll be one of the Angeles girls."

"There's only one Angeles girl," Saran reminded her.

"There's plenty of them. Lahela, Lee, Vermudez... it's a state of mind, is Angeles, not a matter of geography. We're north, Rouen is south, they're Angeles. They'll pick one of them to make the Crown look foolish and then take the rest of us out back behind the safehouse and put us down like Old Yeller."

"Are you ever _not _a cynical bastard, Jones?" Corvina Rouen had found, borrowed or stolen a pair of dark shades, but her faint amusement was apparent even with her eyes hidden behind them. "You rather seem to delight in visions of gloom and doom."

"You're not," Ekaitza replied. "Entirely incorrect. More exciting than the alternative, don't you think?" She clapped Yue on her shoulder. Saran thought she saw the smaller girl's teeth rattle. "No offense meant, little Yukimura. At least you got to make a first impression - good or bad, it's more than the rest of us. I'm sure you positively charmed the crown off him."

Corvina's smile was wicked. "Oh," the Sonage girl said, the world reflected very distortedly in the lens of her sunglasses. "Let us hope not."

* * *

From the window of Lissa Dove's room in the safehouse, she could see Corvina Rouen's little group walking downslope towards the ruins of the town that lay in the valley below. They were a small group of girls, all dark haired, three northern, with a single southern girl as their pseudo-queen, Rouen relishing her influence over the others. Or, at least, that was all that Lissa could see when she looked at them. Little Yue, so desperate to be included, to win approval, to move herself closer to the crystalline dream of a happy life. Elegant Saran, good-natured to a fault, focused and thoughtful, every inch a composed Four. Those two were already favourites to win the Selection. Was that why Rouen was making it her business to get her hooks into them so early on?

Ekaitza Jones reminded Lissa strongly of one of the Outsiders. She was a blunt, slightly rough girl, missing one finger on her left hand where she claimed to have tussled with a wolf and a tooth where she had got into a fight in a parking lot outside of a bar in Baffin - Lissa found one much easier to believe than the other. Lissa had gathered that Ekaitza and her grandfather had done some smuggling work for Pandora, guiding weapons pilfered from Crown and rebel stocks alike through the taiga and the northern wastes and across the water, where they were easily spirited away into the Russian Federation or even further north into Greenland and Iceland. That was probably why Rouen had found it so easy to recruit Ekaitza as her persistent shadow. They had both tithed in to Pandora in some small way - Lissa had heard that Rouen waitressed, and functionally managed, a few of the money-laundering facilities Illéa still insisted on calling restaurants.

Lissa had never liked Pandora very much. They were bullies and thugs who maintained a thin veneer of professionalism simply by virtue of some small degree of competence - and that clearly went to shit as soon as they came close to a complication, as the fiasco two nights ago had shown. Lissa's little family had never trusted them much. Lissa's little family never trusted anyone but each other.

She didn't care what Rouen had said. It had been the Pandora operatives that had fucked up. It had been some members of the shadowy mafia with which Corvina was enmeshed that wanted to sneak into the Wastelands and pass information to the supposed waitress. One of Lissa's old friends, a guy who had been in her gang shortly before he had joined the rebels, had agreed to pass the co-ordinates of the proposed meeting place to the Pandora goons who wanted to meet with Corvina.

Amidst it all, something had gone very, very wrong. Thiago had known what was happening. He had got ahead of them, and he had sabotaged it all. And now Lissa was sitting on her bed, jumping at every sound outside, ready for the Court in Exile to drag her outside for an interrogation, and a quick death.

(So far, there hadn't been much that was ominous outside her door; she had heard Soledad and Marjorie whispering quietly in the corridor, Soledad saying "there's been three more eliminations, Jori, they announced them earlier" and Marjorie replying, "I absolutely owe you one, Sol" and Soledad laughing and whispering, "and I managed to keep you in the loop without giving you a heart attack, you're very welcome")

Lissa had worried that her old friend would be killed, but she had glimpsed Huck earlier that day, looking pale and slightly scared, but still very much alive. He had caught her eye, and smiled, and nodded, and Lissa had given him a wide, encouraging smile in response. It was nice to know that the Outsiders seemed to have come out of this a little better off than Pandora had, for once.

Even a girl as bubbly and hopeful as the former Eight, who had named herself for a character in a children's book, who had tried to set up her own circus as a child, who had literally gathered an enormous group of orphans around her and said _I will protect you if the wider world will not_, would find it hard to stay positive, given the situation.

And yet, Lissa Dove managed. She always did.

* * *

Atiena Morris had known that it was likely the rebels would be searching their rooms, that the rebels would not wish to risk even the slimmest opportunity for secrets or deceit, but it still came as a surprise as she returned to her room that evening and found Thiago, the king's spymaster, sitting on her bed and turning a white envelope over in his hands. Atiena did not recognise it, but her stomach sank as she realised what it likely contained.

"You know," he said, quite conversationally. "We don't get postal service out here."

Atiena's hands curled into fists at her side. She kept her composure. "Yes. I had noticed."

"How did you expect to get this letter to Tammins, Lady Atiena? To Mr Morris?"

Atiena shrugged. "Hadn't really got that far." Truth be told, it had been more of a confessional experience - spilling out her thoughts and feelings onto the page, now that she was trapped here in the desert, so far from all that she had ever known and trusted, trying to get it down onto paper before it had slipped from her memory like so much mist. Usually the Selected were permitted to send a few letters home, and she had found it unlikely that a rebel Selection would be willing to facilitate open communication, but writing it down, even if its fate was to remain unsent, had helped her to collect and organise her thoughts. She had addressed it to the man she had only ever known as Killmonger, and the information contained within had been curated as he had taught her when she was young. _If you're putting something down in writing, assume that it'll be read. If you're putting something down in writing, assume it'll be read in precisely the wrong way. If you're putting something down in writing, assume the queen will read it out at your execution._

_In other words, don't put anything down in writing._

But she was so far away from her family. It was late in the evening. Dusk stained the sky. Lethal would be moving out into the city, aiming for some weapons cache, sabotaging some Crown installation, infiltrating the Tammins communication hub so that Daniel could interfere with it remotely. Their comms would be alive with chatter as Maria and Daniel positioned themselves and busied themselves and readied to provide Lethal and Killmonger with the kind of unspoken support the Morrises excelled in. They rarely needed to speak, so well did they know each other, but, well, Atiena was so far away right now that she would have been glad to speak to them. She had never thought of herself as codependent, but she wasn't afraid to admit that she missed her family.

But even despite how much she missed them, she had been careful to keep her words vague. Killmonger would understand what she wanted to say, because he would understand what she had not written - what she had not felt safe to say, what she had not yet seen. The Morrises communicated best in the empty spaces between sound.

And yet, even though her letter could not possibly incriminate her in any way, Thiago's eyes were like scalpels on her.

"Hmm." Thiago turned the letter over in his hands. "Did one of the others promise to deliver it for you? In return for favours?"

_Favours_?

"No." Atiena didn't trust herself to say anything more.

"Were you planning on giving it to one of the eliminated Selected, to courier it back?"

"No."

"Had you arranged for one of your family to come into the Wastelands to collect it?"

"No."

The corner of Thiago's mouth curled, like a piece of burning paper. "So you just... wrote it. Just... because?"

Atiena shrugged. "Just because."

"You don't say much. You don't tell them much. _The Selection is underway. Haven't met the king. __Give my love to Mama and the twins_." Had he memorised it? "Don't you want to tell your family how you are?"

"You want me to tell them _more_?"

"I'm just wondering why you didn't." Thiago paused, shrugged, and flicked the letter down onto the ground. Atiena watched it flutter down, landing on the edge of the carpet. "You want to talk to your family?"

"Talk to them?"

Thiago shrugged. He was not wearing the purple coat that he usually did, a sort of gaudy garment that seemed to purposefully flout the expectation of a spymaster's discretion. He was dressed rather casually, like he had just come from a meeting, like he had spent the last few days in a situation room with nothing but caffeine and smuggled information for company - black braces and a dishevelled shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbow. He didn't look like the sort of man who got stressed easily, and yet there was a weariness etched in the lines of his body, like if he wasn't vigilant he might cave in on himself. Atiena had seen that look on Killmonger's face more than once.

"Talk to them. Send them a letter. Let them know that you're okay."

Atiena paused. "Are you offering this to everyone?"

Thiago shook his head. "Of course I'm not."

"_Well_," she had said earlier. "_I guess I'm special_."

"Well," she said now. "I guess I'm special."

"I guess you are."

"Can I ask you why?"

She knew he would not tell her the truth. That wasn't the trade. That wasn't the craft.

Much like the Morris family, the truth would lie in the silence, in what was left unsaid.

Thiago Wesick said, "you can ask."

Atiena almost smiled. "Will you tell me?"

"Probably not." He stood, the bed creaking as his weight was lifted from it. "I'll be back here tomorrow morning. If you have a letter, I can arrange for it to be sent north. To your family. If you tell me where to find them."

She knew he would read whatever she had to say. She wouldn't have been surprised if Killmonger received a letter blackened with redactions, nothing left legibile or comprehensible. And yet, they would know she was alright. She would leave them what she  
could in those empty spaces. They wouldn't worry. They would know.

She said, "what do you want in return?"

Everyone always wanted something. Veronica had taught her that, and Atiena had paid her back with a knife in the throat for it. No one ever cared for nothing.

Thiago did not answer her question directly. Instead, he simply said, "you know, the king speaks very highly of the Morrises."

Atiena found it hard to believe that he even knew who they were. There were a thousand small militias like them, all across the country - tiny bands of rebels that had not joined the Kingdom in Exile, but which persisted in resisting the Crown in whatever myriad of petty ways they could. The only way Atiena's family stood out, truly, was that they tended to be a little more competent than the rest.

"Does he?"

Thiago shrugged. "He has a soft spot for... families brought together. Forged by serendipity. Bound by choice rather than blood."

"Oh," Atiena said. "There was blood."

Thiago stepped over the letter on the ground and walked over to the door. The rebels had been told to keep their distance from the Selected, and yet Thiago clapped Atiena firmly on the shoulder before he left.

"There always is."

* * *

By the time Marjorie Vermudez found herself writing the first line of her planned exposé for the thirtieth time, she decided that it was probably around time to get some fresh air, and some new information. Though they had been at the safehouse for only a handful of days, she had already amassed a mass of notes that were proving more unwieldy to hide than she had first predicted - the best hiding places were also the most obvious, and though the Selected girls had not discussed the matter, it seemed a common consensus that the rebels were probably searching their rooms any moment that they were not physically there to see and stop them. Marjorie had resorted to writing her notes in her own shorthand, in the tiniest script she could possibly manage, so small that she was sure she would need a magnifying glass to read it back, onto a single A4 piece of paper that she had then slipped into the cavity created when she pried the mirror of her vanity table away from its frame, and then carefully forced it back into place, so there was no hint that it had ever been moved away.

In any case, she would rely on her own memory for the most part. Marjorie never forgot a detail.

Laughter had risen up to her window, and Marjorie glanced outside to see that a few of the rebels were standing outside the picket fence with a broken down car and tinkering with the engine quite lazily. Was this what amounted to free time for the citizens of the Kingdom in Exile? A few of them were cleaning guns and brewing tea and patching clothes - though Marjorie could not quite make out what they were saying, she could tell that it had a friendly lilt to it, more gossip and idle talk than anything tactical. Was this their social space, their time for relaxation? Had all Uzokuwa's talk of _Diadem_been a mere smokescreen to give the Selected girls a rosier view of the world they were now entering?

Marjorie decided she had nothing better to do than find out - indeed, it was probably her duty. The king had not elected to select her for a date, and was not making himself available for conversations at any other time, so Marjorie decided she was probably as well off to get talking to others around them. Demetri had grown up among these people. That was the story the Selected had been given. These were not only his citizens, but his friends. Maybe they could offer some insight. Marjorie didn't argue with herself much beyond that, but quickly slipped on her shoes, pulled on a cardigan, and headed down the stairs to the little arid patch of dust outside the door that the girls had taken to referring to as, only slightly ironically, the orchard.

Maybe not so ironic anymore. Elizabeth Taylor, the blonde girl from Midston, was kneeling by the fence, her fingertips stained with soil, as she tended the dirt. Was she planting something? She offered Marjorie a friendly smile and a tiny wave as the Clermont Selected passed. Marjorie couldn't say she had made friends in this Selection, but there were a few girls more prone to cordiality than others. You could rely on Eden or Sol for a polite nod and a kind word here and there; you could rely on Opal or Nina for a glower and a shrug in your general direction. "Evening, Jo, you doing okay?"

Marjorie nodded, and smiled. "Been worse, Liz. How about you?"

Liz gestured. "Making myself useful. Thought some chuparosa might brighten this place up a bit."She stood, and brushed her hands on her trousers, seemingly heedless of the brown prints they left on the fabric. "Here's hoping we're around to see them bloom." There was no malice in her voice - she was simply stating a plain truth.

"Here's hoping," Marjorie echoed.

They weren't the only Selected out at this hour; Lissa Dove, the delicate blonde waif from Likely, was sprawled on the dirt on the other side of the fence, and was helping a small rebel with blue hair to work through a large pile of clothes that had to be repaired. Lissa's needle flashed argent in the bright sunshine, despite the later hour; it was winking brightly as she stitched neatly and quickly, much more efficiently and tidily than Marjorie would ever have thought the former Eight was capable of being. But then, she thought, girls like Lissa probably got used to self-sufficiency. They had to look out for themselves. They had to make do with what they had.

There was a reason the rebel girls in the Selection were finding it a little easier to adapt than the others.

"Little pearl!" called one of the rebels bent over the engine, his sleeves rolled to his elbow. It was Field Marshal Uzokuwa himself, a new bruise blossoming over one eye, a new cut curling his lip, some scratches running up along his arm. He was standing with a boy Marjorie could only describe as pretty, with dirty blond hair touching his shoulders and a heart-shaped face with a small scar running from the corner of his left eye to the point of his cheekbone; the two had been conferring quietly about the state of the car. "You've survived this long."

"I have," Marjorie agreed. She had been under the impression that the rebels were discouraged from interacting with the Selected, but it seemed likely that Uzokuwa outranked such policies. "So far."

"You're doing better than the rest," the younger man said.

Uzokuwa nodded and walked around the car to peer more closely at some aspect of the vehicle's inner workings - it was all utterly foreign to Marjorie. "Can't underestimate how well you've done to stay this long. Lady Marjorie, Theo Malone. Theodore, Marjorie."

The two exchanged greetings. Uzokuwa pointed out a few other rebels and named a few further names - Farid, Anzu, Wren, Phineas, Mikhail. Marjorie made a silent note of each one: Farid, an olive-skinned man with piercing hazel eyes and a soothing voice rivalled only by the caramel tones of the blue-haired Wren. Anzu, a tall, thin woman with a shaved head and massive burns on the left side of her face. Phineas and Mikhail, bleach-blonde twins roughly as tall and broad as a barge, distinguished only by Phineas' missing forearm, Mikhail's eyepatch. Each one bore the marks of a short lifetime in the Wastelands. Marjorie wondered how long it would take before the Selected were indelibly scarred in such a way.

Marjorie didn't want to judge. She wanted to understand.

But she didn't want to be too obvious in her questions, so instead she just stood by the car, and handed Uzokuwa and Theo various tools as they asked for them, and did her best to follow their conversation and try to subtly steer it when she felt that it would be appropriate. They were not, to her disappointment, discussing much of importance - there was some sporting event occurring in Swendway that a handful of the rebels seemed to be following with detached interest. "Uzohola owes me a box of cigars if the Federation wins," Uzokuwa confided in Marjorie. He meant the Saharan Federation - he always did. "Such an unpatriotic girl, that one, can you believe - pass me the torque wrench, little pearl?"

Marjorie pulled one from the set. "This?"

"That's a socket wrench, grab the one with the blue handle.. yep, thanks, darling. So Germany was up six points before France played that last match..."

To her disappointment, Lissa and Wren's conversations were little more interesting, for Lissa was talking about the friends she had left behind in Likely, nothing Marjorie hadn't heard before. Here and there, Wren chimed in with some information about the life that she had left behind in Honduragua to join the rebellion, but as far as Marjorie could tell, the two were chiefly comparing orphanage experiences, which, though intriguing, didn't have much to do with why Marjorie was here - and in any case, was exceedingly difficult to listen in on subtly.

Her decision to focus on the conversation between Anzu, Theo and Uzokuwa paid off when the burned woman said, quite casually, "at least the Goidelic Union lost early on. I promised Demetri my .38 if they won."

Marjorie strained to remain casual, but she was sure that any curiosity on her part could be easily written off as normal Selection prying as she asked, "Demetri follows soccer?"

"Only because Täj does," Uzokuwa said, with a slight laugh.

"The king and Täj are close?" Marjorie wasn't sure she had seen any sign of this. Then again, she had barely seen any sign of Demetri himself.

Anzu laughed. "Careful, Uzo, she's going to try to cozy up to the pale dog to get closer to the king if you keep talking like that."

"If she manages that," Uzokuwa said. "She deserves to be queen."

"That Morris girl was getting very chatty with him earlier." Theo spun a screwdriver in his hand and pried some component out of the engine.

"By chatty," Anzu said. "Do you mean he said two stray words about impending doom and then fucked off to brood?"

The group laughed, but there was no cruelty in it. It reminded Marjorie of how she imagined siblings would laugh amongst one another, knowing that no insult could sting too badly, so much history did they share, so much trust had they vested in one another. Indeed, Uzokuwa proved as much as he continued, "if it wasn't for the Selection, I'd tell that boy to go for it. God knows he deserves a bit of happiness."

"Even with the Selection," Anzu said, a playful smile tugging at her lips. "I'd tell him to go for it." She winked at Marjorie. "You girls are utterly wasted on our Demetri, I think."

"Don't," Uzokuwa chided Anzu lightly. "You'll drive them all off."

Marjorie blinked. "Demetri isn't...?"

Anzu laughed. "God, no," she said with a smile. "Just... thoroughly oblivious."

"Putting it lightly," Theo murmured.

How casually they all spoke about their supposed king. Was this a sign that Demetri wasn't the true crown prince, abducted from the palace, only a commoner artificially elevated to a hollow position of responsibility that the rebels were not inclined to respect? Or was it merely an indication that the rebels had grown up in the same tight-knit pack as the king, and treated them as one would a little brother who had achieved unexpected, but not necessarily undeserved, success? Even Uzokuwa and Anzu didn't seem quite as casual with him as Uzohola and Wick sometimes seemed; rumours had flashed about the Selected regarding the precise relationship between the king and the co-ordinator, after a half-dozen of the girls had seen the way that the two spoke, and hugged, and stood close together. It had been Ekaitza Jones who had disabused the rest of them, quite thoroughly, of any idea along those lines - "don't any of you have _siblings_? Or are you all so sex-starved here in the middle of nowhere that you're imagining tension anywhere and everywhere?"

She had a wonderfully blunt way of cutting everyone down to size.

"Oblivious," Marjorie echoed, but neither Anzu nor Theo seemed inclined to elaborate further as Uzokuwa returned to the engine, so Marjorie elected to chance a question of her own. "Have you guys always been close to his Majesty?"

Theo looked at Uzokuwa for permission to answer this question, but it was Anzu who shook her head. The burned side of her face didn't seem capable of moving much, so her smile was very uneven. "Nah," she said lightly. "We get moved around a lot; you tend to bond the most with your unit. For Demetri, that's -"

"The inner circle?" Marjorie offered. Over by the fence, Liz had stood up, satisfied with her handiwork, and she and Lissa were on their way back into the safehouse, chatting quietly together.

Uzokuwa nodded. "Got it in one." He threw something to Theo, and changed the subject seamlessly. "How come you're always hanging around these days, Malone? Got your eye on someone in the Selection?"

Theo laughed, but it was not a comfortable laugh. "I think not," he said, slightly awkwardly. "I'm just waiting on some cars."

"Who'd you lend them to? Vardi Tayna? Because you know you're never getting it back if that's the case, she's probably driven it into some canyon..."

Marjorie raised an eyebrow. Vardi Tayna? The Selected girl from Dominica?

"Even worse," Theo said ruefully. "Täj."

Uzokuwa and Anzu winced. "Yeah," Uzokuwa said. "You can probably write that one off."

"And Demetri."

Over by the fence, Farid barked out a short laugh. "Demetri? For his date?"

Theo nodded, and held up a hand, shaking his head. "I _know_, you don't need to say..."

"Just Demetri, and his date? Who's his date?" Mikhail seemed like the sort to be perpetually behind the rest of the conversation. "That Liara girl? She's very..."

"She's Lady Liara, actually," Farid corrected him archly.

"_Vardi Tayna_," Wren said, and wiggled her eyebrows suggestively. They were very dark, in contrast to the vivid light blue of her crew-cut hair. There was no chiming in of _She's Lady Vardi, actually_. The group seemed united in their familiarity towards the girl from Dominica.

Theo groaned. "Guys, seriously..."

Phineas laughed. "You might want to give it a good clean when you get it back, that's all I'm saying."

"Hold your tongue," Uzokuwa warned. "He may be our king... but even so, there's a limit to what I'll let you say about my friend." That prompted a laugh, as Theo turned and held a hand over his eyes to peer in the direction of the wastes.

"Nearly on time." There was, indeed, a plume of dust rising on the horizon. "This is _most _unlike them."

Marjorie was still trying to absorb everything the group had flung about so casually as the car drew up beside the band of rebels and the man they called Täj slid out, his face drawn and weary.

"Evening," Anzu called, and was dismissed with a wave in her direction from Täj as he went around to the trunk of the car to pull out a khaki duffel bag and a revolver that he slipped into a holster on his belt. "Solemn bastard."

Uzokuwa shot Anzu a look of reprimand. He spoke softly, but Marjorie could still hear the words he exchanged with the burned woman. "He does a hard job, Zu."

Anzu looked suitably chastened. "Yeah."

Täj walked over to the orchard, and dropped his duffel bag on the ground by the gate. Theo said, sounding like he was trying to be cheerful, "you kept it in one piece." The pale man responded with a shrug and a nod. Marjorie had never seen him go this long without smoking before. They may have only been at the safehouse for a scatter of days, but Täj, when he was around, always seemed to be outside with a cigarette, looking vaguely apocalyptic. To be fair, he still looked like that now.

The other car was on the horizon now, and Marjorie realised quite abruptly that she was on the cusp of meeting the king himself. It was too late to run back into the safehouse to get changed, or make herself more presentable - it was meet him now, or leave it up to fate as to when she would get that chance again.

Marjorie Vermudez was never one to run from a story, and right now the star of her story was driving towards her.

So she stayed where she was.

The car screeched to a halt next to the one Täj had parked, and Theo winced ("knew I forgot to oil something"), and Demetri himself appeared at the door of the vehicle. Marjorie recoiled briefly at the sight of his injuries, but her fascination could not be deterred for long - she itched to ask a long array of questions, starting with _what happened to your face_ and ending with _no, seriously, what_ the fuck_ happened to your face?_ She didn't know how she managed to resist the urge, as Lady Vardi stepped out of the car as well. She was a pretty, if unremarkable girl, with very dark and somewhat fox-like eyes, thick black hair brushing her collarbones with a set of blunt bangs, a short red tartan skirt and a short-sleeved black blouse that left her slender arms very bare. Marjorie couldn't say she knew the girl well - indeed, the closest Marjorie had come to her was the music that drifted across the hallway from her room at all hours of the day and night. She could see now that Vardi Tayna was not a tall girl; Demetri positively dwarfed her as he came around the car to shut the door behind her, and she shot him a playful look.

"Evening, lovebirds," Phineas called, quite delightedly. Vardi Tayna rolled her eyes in clear exasperation, but she did not protest as Demetri bent to brush his lips across her cheek. It was an oddly intimate gesture; Marjorie had to fight the urge to look away and give them some privacy. She could see she was not the only one; Täj had averted his gaze, as one might from the sun.

Marjorie was just close enough to catch the slightest hint of what they were saying to one another. "Thanks for keeping me in my place," Demetri said, and Vardi Tayna replied, quite softly, "oh, any time, Demusha, any time at all."

She did not acknowledge Marjorie as she walked past her - Marjorie mentally counted her as one of the unfriendly Selected girls - but Demetri offered the Clermont girl a wide smile as he walked over to inspect Uzokuwa's handiwork. "Lady Marjorie. A delight."

"The pleasure is all mine," Marjorie replied.

Theo hissed, "_your Majesty_."

"Your Majesty," Marjorie added smoothly. "It's lovely to meet you."

Vardi Tayna passed Täj on her way back into the safehouse. They did not look at one another. The dark haired girl disappeared into the building, and shut the door firmly behind her.

"And you. You must accept my apologies that we did not meet sooner - Uzo, I think you need to tighten this a little more..." He pointed at something in the engine that Marjorie could not hope in any world to name. "...Lady Marjorie, how have you been finding the experience so far?"

"Quite lovely, thank you."

Demetri nodded, quite distractedly. "We must arrange some date," he added. "Sometime soon, I don't want you to feel neglected in the Selection... Theo, you ready to go?"

"So soon?" Marjorie asked boldly, opening her eyes wide and inquisitive.

Demetri lifted one shoulder in a casual shrug. "Most unfortunately. Much preparation to be done for the next Report, Lady Marjorie... At least it should hopefully provide you all some excitement, some break from routine."

Marjorie paused, nodded, and smiled. "I look forward to it very much."

Demetri returned the expression. "And I look forward to seeing you there. We'll talk soon about doing something, just you and I... Malone, come on."

Theo had become distracted by some movement in the window, but Demetri's words seemed to snap him out of it. "Of course, your Eminence," he added, seeming for a moment to have forgotten Marjorie's presence, and caught the keys as Demetri tossed them in his direction. Demetri offered Marjorie a polite incline of his head and a quick "it was an absolute delight, Lady Marjorie" and she quickly replied "oh, likewise", and then the king was gone once more.

Always on the move.

Was she _ever _going to get some answers?

Marjorie glanced over towards the safehouse, looking to see what had distracted Theo so. Her eye was drawn by movement in the orchard. Täj was digging up the seedlings that Liz had planted, his gestures slow and methodical. He looked tired. The pale man was even paler than usual. Wren answered a question that Marjorie had not asked. "Chuparosa grows red."

"So what if it does?"

Farid gestured towards the clear blue sky, unmarred by cloud cover, or indeed anything beneath which the rebels could hide. "Red's too bright." Like Liz earlier, there was no anger there, only a resignation and an acceptance that this was the way things were. "They'll see it."

"They?"

"The bastard king. The wretched queen. The Crown."

Marjorie understood. "So," she said softly. "No flowers?"

Wren's voice was sad. "No flowers," she agreed.

* * *

Mordred was in the rose garden when his uncle came to tell him the rebels were in the midst airing another Report. Set's face was stony, his voice grim. "You don't have to watch it, if you don't want to."

Mordred set his jaw. "Why wouldn't I want to?"

The queen was watching it in one of the numerous drawing rooms that populated the third floor of the palace, perched on the edge of a low soft couch, the folds of her dress gathered about her knees and ankles, hands knotted in the material at her lap as she focused icily on the screen in front of her. After escorting his nephew in, Set went to the couch to place what he probably intended to be a soothing hand on her shoulder; nonetheless, she remained obviously stressed and impatient as the seal of the rebellion flashed up on the screen, set into a dark red background, a flourish playing over it that was not quite the Illéan national anthem, but close enough to make it clear what they were aping.

Mordred stayed by the door, and folded his arms, already making a mental note to call his Council together at first opportunity to respond to whatever lies the rebels intended to spread tonight.

No longer was the rebel Selection set in slightly shadowy studios, the imposter claiming his brother's name illuminated by artificial bleached-white light, the broadcast hijacked and redirected to force the signal into the living rooms of loyal citizens. No, the Kingdom in Exile had found themselves a gorgeous open vestibule of some ancient manor, and rather than hold their Report on an empty soundstage as the palace did, their Report was taking place in the wood-pannelled, marble-tiled foyer, with the Selected ladies lining the broad staircase and the balcony of the landing overhead, each resplendent in vividly coloured dresses, no two girls clad in precisely the same colour. Like butterflies caught in a glass jar, Mordred thought darkly, jewel-toned birds in a caged aviary. He could not hold himself back from scanning their ranks as the camera panned quickly across them, and Set said what the three were all thinking: "there's so few."

Ysabel's voice was snapping ice. "I wonder what they're doing with the girls they eliminate."

Mordred thought he knew what his mother would suggest, if she was in charge of the Selection in Exile. Dead girls whispered no secrets. The Wastelands had a lot of empty space in which to hide the bodies. None of the rebels were strangers to murder.

And yet, as the camera came down to focus on the imposter they were calling Demetri, Mordred found himself staring at his rival and wondering if this strange, subversive man had cold enough blood to do what Ysabel would. He thought the real Demetri had always seemed too sweet a child to resort to such measure - but then, soft-hearted Demmy would probably have baulked at becoming the figurehead of an insurgency responsible for massacres and the bombings of hospitals.

But then, you never knew people. Vivian Lahela probably would have said the same of Eden, once upon a time.

The man who was not Demetri smiled into the camera, a practisedly natural expression. "Good evening, Illéa. Thank you for joining us."

"How is this being broadcast?" Mordred asked his uncle, his brow creasing as he watched the imposter walk across the foyer to take a seat beside Wickaninnish Harjo, the popular propaganda hero of the rebellion. He'd become famous for doling out soup and bread to refugees and pulling children out of rubble after a building had collapsed and handing out blankets to doe-eyed orphans in a bomb shelter - Mordred thought it was probably more important to ask who had driven those refugees from their homes, who had collapsed that building, who had made those children orphans. "I didn't hear about any hijacked communications hub..."

Set shook his head. "They're broadcasting in their own capacity to occupied territories and friendly nations."

Ysabel said, very softly, "we're the only ones in Angeles who are receiving the signal."

So it was unlikely they had much to say - otherwise, they would be trying to disseminate more widely, more urgently. Mordred turned back to the screen just as Harjo greeted the imposter and said, "Twenty down, your Majesty, fifteen to go - looking to set records, are we?"

"Set records?" It was all scripted, and the imposter was playing his part perfectly - green eyes slightly wide, the tiniest smile curling his lips. Mordred was sure that Wesick was feeding back to him how his past Reports had been received, and that his public image was being ever-so-subtly tweaked at every moment, to convince those who had not yet been swayed, to keep those who had been already persuaded safely on side. The popular view in Angeles was that the imposter came across as a little too polished, a little too cold, a little too rehearsed - _like Queen Ysabel_was the common refrain, although Mordred was sure that last detail had been safely kept from his mother by the machinations of his dear uncle. Certainly he was sure he would have heard about it if it had weaseled its way into the royal sphere. "What on earth could you mean, Wick?"

"Well, sir, I rather think we're on track for one of the fastest Selections in history if you keep up this pace." Wick's eyes gleamed under the studio lights of the foyer. "Twenty girls eliminated in just two weeks! Tell me, are you very picky, or do you already have someone in mind, maybe?"

The ghost of a smile. "Wouldn't that rather ruin the fun, Wick?"

"_Fun_ \- not convinced you know the meaning of the word, my dear Demetri." Wick shot a look into the camera. "Absolute workaholic, this one."

The imposter forced a laugh. Was it Mordred's imagination, or was he moving a little more stiffly than usual? Their spies near the border had suggested that the supposed king had been caught up in an explosion nearly two weeks ago, but the man on the television screen seemed absolutely unblemished, without even the spectre of tiredness to mark his face. Mordred almost envied him.

Wick was reclining into his seat, transparently loving this whole exchange. He was dressed much more casually than his companion, almost laughably so - a plain blue short-sleeved t-shirt and dark denim jeans, a little worn at the knees, like he had been pulled off some distant recovery effort and rushed to this pseudo-palace for the exclusive duty of performing this interview. Wick's image as a man of the people was much more concrete in the minds of the Illéan people - it was important to be consistent. It might have mattered more in an official broadcast; the rebel's knock-off had always come across as a little more personable and informal, more a t-shirt and trainers affair than the tuxedo and tie business of the palace's Report. Wick Harjo could only ever have appeared on the Selection in Exile. "So, are you telling me you've managed to tear yourself away from governance long enough to get to know these lovely ladies?"

"Not as often as I would like, and not as well as I would like," the imposter replied. "But whatever time we have spent together has been an absolute pleasure and honour. Truly, Illéa is right to be proud of its Daughters."

"Those of you who have been following at home will have seen some of the interviews we've aired with some of the Selected. Each of the ladies come across wonderfully - it must be difficult for any one to make her mark and differentiate herself from the rest."

"You'd have to ask them, Wick. All I can say that each one has seemed to me an intelligent, capable and kind young woman, who would make an excellent queen and a most wonderful wife." The imposter had crossed his legs and got very comfortable in his chair - this was the most relaxed Mordred had ever seen him, albeit blatantly rehearsedly so. Mordred wondered if that was why Wick had been chosen to take up the interviewer role that had been previously inhabited by two otherwise unremarkable rebels: Inzhu Änuran, now going by Wren, a worker from one of Honduragua's busiest steel factories and Farid Abboud, a truck driver who had defected from Carolina. Wick was known, and liked, by the populace - and clearly, he was known, and liked, by the false King of Ashes as well. "And each has made their mark in their own unique way."

"Well, you can't just say that and not elaborate." Wick raised one eyebrow and leaned in towards the imposter, and the camera, quite conspiratorially. "Otherwise, it just across as something you say to make it _seem_ like you've got to know them."

A ripple of laughter went through the girls assembled on the stairs and landing. The girls on the bottom step were the only ones whose faces Mordred could make out clearly - one dressed in dark moss green, nearly the same colour as the imposter's eyes, the other the deep blue of the ocean once the sun had set.

The girl on the left was lean and pale blonde, with downturned gray eyes and a strong jaw that made her look stubborn. Elizabeth Tucker's family had a reputation not for rebelling but for abetting - they had always patched up, fed, and hidden soldiers from either side who stumbled onto their little farm in quiet Midston. Mordred could well understand how they had decided to do so, and how they had gotten away with it for so long, with one look at the quiet strength that seemed to exude from the Tucker girl.

The girl on the right was tiny, with deep brown skin and glasses that seemed huge on her small face, her brown hair pulled back into an elaborate updo that mirrored a style that had been originally popularised by the late Queen Jael. Opal McIntyre's family had been lighthouse keepers for as long as anyone in Hansport could remember - they had been poor before and after the rebellion, their status little improved by the occupation of their province by the Kingdom in Exile. Her thick brows were dark, furrowed slashes in the warm light of the foyer, and even though she was surely aware of the eyes of the nation upon her, her fake smile was undercut by the gloomy look in her eyes as she looked at the false king through lowered lashes.

"An excellent point," the imposter conceded. "Well, it might take a little too long to go through all fifteen of them -"

"Well, maybe you could tell us about five."

"- but we probably have time for five, yes, if you want to insist." The gold chain at the imposter's throat flashed - a golden box, with its lid open and a red star, each point an arrow, rising out of it -as he straightened himself in his seat and glanced around at the assembled girls. "Well, and where to begin? Well, Lady Opal rather seems a seventy year old man trapped in a much younger skin... grumpy, oh yes very, but also very wise. Sage, I would say. She could put me in my place, let me tell you. Lady Elizabeth is never afraid to tell you to shut it if she thinks that you're running your mouth on something you don't know much about, so be careful you don't mix up a John Deere with a Massey Ferguson when she's around. A very capable debate partner."

Tucker laughed softly in the background, and half-turned to acknowledge the smiles of the girls behind her. Someone had garnered a reputation.

"Lady Eden reminds me very much of a very dear friend of mine," the imposter continued. "She'll tell you she's a realist, but really it's just pessimism, through and through. You've never met someone so practical, so pragmatic. Always asking, _what's the use_?"

Wick laughed. "A healthy attitude in the Wastelands, one might say."

"I have no doubt Lady Eden would fit in wherever she went. She's an adaptable sort."

"Well, Majesty, that's three, and I might pick the next two... you know, it's amazing, but some of these girls already have _thriving _fanbases that are just clamoring for more information about them. The beautiful Lady Nina was a miner, wasn't she?"

Lady Nina was no great beauty - a tall, malnourished girl with a freckled and slightly gaunt face from hunger, her eyes the most piercing shade of blue and sunken under a pair of unkempt eyebrows knotted in focus; she seemed to stare right through the screen as the cameras fixed upon her. She was dressed in a charcoal gray dress that left her muscular arms bare.

"Maybe once upon a time. She's a rebel through and through, Wick. I admire her greatly. I think it was our co-ordinator, Uzohola, who said it best - much like a piece of coal, Lady Nina is rough around the edges, but a diamond lies beneath."

Mordred could almost see the imposter himself wincing at the triteness of the lines he was being expected to repeat. How much of this was actually him? If Mordred had to guess, he would have put it at somewhere between ten percent and absolutely zero. These were the observations of others, regurgitated to come across as details the false king himself had perceived - indeed, this might just have been the information that the girls supplied themselves in their submissions to the Selection. The imposter was saying nothing that a good background check wouldn't have turned up.

"And another one that has the world talking - Lady Soledad?"

Another unremarkable girl, with her dark hair loose about her shoulders, dressed in a pale silver dress whose trailing ends seemed to float on the air like it was less than material. She gave the camera a tiny curtsy and a polite wave as it panned across her and - there! - standing behind her, visible only in the blur of the background, a familiar pair of piercing dark eyes set into an elfen face, her dark hair pulled back severely to bare her hollow cheekbones, her scalpel-sharp jaw._Liara. _

"Lady Soledad," the imposter was saying. "She tends to be quiet, but that's usually because she's listening rather than trying to speak over everyone else always. Living lie detector, that girl - I've never encountered anyone as passionate about the truth, and the pursuit of justice, in my life. And I count you among that number, Wick."

Wick laughed. "Well, there's a title even_I_ cannot be competitive with - the more people like that in the world, the better."

"Thank goodness you decided against joining my Selection, Wick. You might have been in trouble, with this sort of luminary company to compete against."

Wick shook his head, a mocking sorrow etching his face. "A wise man knows when to fold them, your Majesty - surely Lady Opal has treated you to that gem?"

"She tends not to rely on clichés as much as you do, Wickaninnish."

"And I'm sure she's all the better for it." Wick glanced at the notes in his hands, and shuffled them briefly. "Well, we're nearly running out of time. Your Majesty - thank you so much for joining us."

"My great pleasure."

"A final question that I have heard asked by absolutely everyone - with such a rapid elimination process, do you foresee that we will reach the Elite soon?"

The imposter shook his head, looking thoughtful. They had to use this opportunity to address all doubts, Mordred knew: the whispers that they had eliminated too many too quickly, the suspicion that those from Illéan provinces were at a sharp disadvantage to others, the rumours that the prince himself had barely interacted with the girls at all, but that these decisions were instead being made by the rebellion's high command to best suit the needs of the Kingdom in Exile. "No, Wick, I don't believe we shall. I think there are certain personality types that maybe simply don't get along very well, or people who don't click. In those sorts of situation, I don't see the point in wasting the time of the young ladies who have been kind enough to join the Selection. If I have retained a member of the Selection thus far, then it is because I honestly believe that, given the chance, I could love them wholly and honestly as my wife, and respect and trust them as the queen of our great kingdom. Now that I have narrowed them to that field - easier said than done! - I do indeed to take a little more time and get to know each one before I make any further decisions."

"Very well phrased indeed, sir."

Was it just Mordred's imagination, or did the imposter seem to dislike that honorific?

Wickaninnish Harjo was issuing some sort of sign-off as Ysabel muted the television and turned to face her son with a tired sigh. "Well, that was a lot of nothing."

"You sound surprised." Mordred was darkly amused. "Surely you knew how these Selection Reports usually go?"

"I had the audacity to hope they might include something interesting." Ysabel tossed the remote onto the couch next to her. "Have you spoken to Commander Lee?"

Mordred nodded. "Our mole has been talking."

"Singing like a bird," was how Set preferred to put it. "Your mother tells me you've authorised an airstrike on the safehouse identified?"

"Has she?" Mordred's voice was distant.

"Killing Illéan citizens." Set could not hide how troubled this prospect had made him.

"Killing defectors."

"That's not how our people will see that. That's not how _I _see it."

"Darling." Ysabel was cajoling. "Those girls chose their fates. They aren't innocent hostages. They're actively competing to become the queen of the regime that is massacring our soldiers, our _loyal _citizens."

"They're children," Set said shortly. "The oldest girl there is what, twenty two years old? And even she was still living with her parents before she disappeared. They're just girls."

"The Kingdom in Exile has always made use of child soldiers," was Mordred's reply. "Child spies. We've never let that stop us before."

And Ysabel's response was equally curt. "They're adults, Set, just as I was when I joined Trajan's Selection. Did you think of me as a little girl then?"

A vein jumped in Set's jaw. "I still don't like to think of them bombed in their beds."

"Do you believe I do?" Mordred shook his head. "We've invited the Kingdom in Exile to the table for peace talks. We've asked for ceasefires. We've fought for peace,while they have fought for power. I don't _like_any part of this, Uncle. But I have no choice, and I have given the order." He met Set's gaze, and could not help his lip curling slightly. "And I _am_ the king, after all."

"I had noticed," Set replied shortly. "I question not your judgment, so I'll thank you not to question my loyalty, Mordred. Only..." He sighed. "Just be ready for backlash. The _Axiom_ and the Lahelas can only achieve so much. Fifteen beautiful young ladies killed in a single, targeted attack?"

"That's why the rebels are holding this Selection." Ysabel's voice was soft. "That propaganda." She glanced at the television screen, where the Report had frozen on a photograph of the whole array of the Selected, each dressed in vivid colours and smiling, a petrified beauty. Liara was wearing a deep, bright, blood red gown. "Easy targets. Vulnerable. And _very _sympathetic."

Set's voice conjured images of arsenic and self-immolation. "I imagine the imposter is half-hoping we _do _kill the lot of them."

* * *

**This is... a very long chapter. My apologies if it's a little too dense! Hopefully it makes up for the delays in updates. Please let me know what you think. **

**In the interest of clarification, the last section, narrated by Mordred, takes place one week after the others.**

**Please do let me know what you thought - I absolutely adore reading your reviews, hearing your theories, and finding out which characters are your favourites or least favourites. I have been absolutely overwhelmed with gratitude for every single review so far.**

**Thanks so much. I hope you enjoyed!**

**\- Izar**


	10. And Why Should I Stay Behind?

**Chapter Ten: ****And Why Should I Stay Behind?**

_The sunset hangs on a cloud; a__ golden storm of glittering sheaves, o__f fair, frail, fluttering leaves._  
_Hark to the voice calling __my heart in the voice of the wind: __its dreams like the fluttering leaves have gone._

\- Sarojini Naidu

* * *

Nina Novak knew a cave-in when she heard one.

The Allens girl was woken in the middle of the night by shouts in the corridor and the sound of panicked footsteps. She tore back her blanket and fell from her bed, reaching for shoes - _did she have time for shoes?_\- even as her door was flung open by one of the rebels, Wick Harjo. Behind him, there was a flurry of motion in the hallway, girls running back and forth, rebels calling out to one another, Uzohola co-ordinating it all from her position on the stairs, her jaw clenched tight, her movements tight and control as she directed people hither-and-thither. Wick's eyes were slightly wild, but somehow Nina did not think that he looked particularly scared. Did he feed off the adrenaline? Nina consistently felt that was the man difference between rebels at home and rebels here - the latter seemed to almost crave revolution, action, danger. "Lady Nina. Assemble outside. Immediately!"

Nina asked, "What's going on?"

But Wick was already gone, moving down the hallway to the next room, the next Selected. It was a good thing, Nina thought darkly, that there were so few of them left. Made for an easier evacuation.

There were only two girls left on this floor out of five.

Packing light would make for an easier evacuation as well. Nina knew that - people who went back into the mines after the seams started to give, after the canary stopped singing, those were the people who never saw the sun again. She lunged towards her vanity to grab the framed picture of her family, yanked her jacket from the back of her door - _did she have time for a jacket__?_ \- and carefully stowed the picture into an inner pocket of the garment, feeling her heart seem to thud against the glass of the frame with every pulse.

The girl with the room opposite Nina - Soledad Delrío, the lawyer - stumbled into the doorway, her eyes still bleary with sleep. "Nina?"

"I'm up," Nina said, automatically, almost robotically. "I'm awake. Sol, let's go, we have to go."

The rebels were starting to sound a little more panicked. Voices spiked. As Nina and Sol ran out into the hallway - no smoke, Nina thought distantly, no smoke and no heat, no debris and no gunfire, so why were they so worried? - she saw Demetri, still dressed as he had been for the Report, taking the steps two at a time as he sprinted upstairs. Even the king himself was getting involved? Things had to be serious.

_Why hadn't they evacuated him first? _

Uzohola was gesturing for the girls, reaching towards them like if the worst came to worst she was ready to shelter them with her body. "Nice and briskly, Lady Nina, Lady Soledad. Just a security drill, you're all doing wonderfully so far. Sorry to disturb your sleep like this..." She sounded light and chipper, like it was midday and she was complimenting them on a staged photograph. Nina might have almost believed her, if it hadn't been for the wildness in Wick's eyes, the panic in the rebels' voices as they shouted outside, the expression on Demetri's face.

Something was happening.

Nina pushed Sol ahead of her and together, the two girls ran down the stairs. It was easier said than done - the staircase was packed with people, and Sol had to hurdle a bag that one of the Selected had clearly abandoned midway down the steps when they thought better of trying to heft its weight through such an emergency. Nina thought they might have been some of the first girls woken - there was a rumble of motion upstairs as people started to move.

"_Asambe, asambe_, let's go, let's go!" The field marshal Uzokuwa was directing girls through the front door and towards one of the waiting trucks beyond the orchard, like they were cargo to be hauled out of a burning building and moved to another dark warehouse, indistinguishable, exchangeable. "Should have brought my stopwatch - you're setting records here, ladies! Let's go - Lady Sol, over there, you're with Mouchard and Farid, third truck there, okay, let's keep it going - Ekaitza, Anzu's the woman for you, on the far right, yeah, that's it - little pearl, you are over there..."

The trucks in question were beginning to peel away, no two travelling away in the same direction - as Nina watched, the dark-haired Vardi Tayna darted across the garden and vaulted into the cabin of a truck even as its wheels started turning, dust rising in its wake as it bounced over a crevice and vanished around the ruins of the town below.

"Mr Ndlovukazi?" Nina was hesitant to interfere, but she couldn't help but notice that the number of vehicles outside the safe house was rapidly declining. Should she just run for the closest one? Did she have time to wait? Would that mean someone else would get left behind? _God helps those that helps themselves__._ "Where should I...?"

The sky was not caving in. What were they running from?

"Lady Nina." Nina almost jumped - Demetri had appeared just behind her quite silently, his eyes serious but his voice very calm. He seemed almost _relaxed_. "I don't suppose you would do me the honour of travelling with me this evening?"

Nina blinked. "Travel?" He made an emergency evacuation sound like a casual hangout. "I mean..." She wasn't going to say no, was she? "Whatever you say, your Highness."

Demetri offered her the slightest smile. "Let's not waste time. That car over there - Uzo, please tell me Täj is already gone."

Uzokuwa shook his head and quickly stepped out of the way to let Wick pass, shepherding Saran and Eden out and onto the nearest truck. "I'll let him know you want him out."

"He should have been gone an hour ago."

"Dimi. Everyone will be fine." Uzo said it almost warningly. Nina found herself scanning the skies for combatant planes, searching the darkness around them for approaching enemies, any indication of what, precisely, had made the rebels so rattled.

Demetri hesitated. "Maybe I should... How many are still here? I can afford to - " Nina had to admire how Demetri looked after his own, made sure people got out before he did. It was not the quality of a smart man, certainly, but perhaps a good one.

Uzohola's head appeared over the railing of the stair. "_Umfo_! If our esteemed king doesn't get the _fuck _out of here, _right _now, I'm going to save Ysabel the trouble and kill him myself!"

Demetri's eyebrow nearly touched his hairline. "Consider me told, Uzo, my love. Lady Nina... let's, as my eloquent friend has suggested, get the _fuck _out of here."

Nina couldn't hold back the slightly manic laugh that erupted from her lips.

Truth be told, she hadn't realised the king was allowed to swear.

It made him seem so much more _human_.

So did his quick reminder of "_seatbelt_!" as soon as they were in the car, almost adorable in how automatic it was, and though Nina did not consider herself a necessarily cautious girl, she didn't want to disappoint the king either, so as Demetri spun the steering wheel and wrenched up the gears, she quickly buckled up and turned in her seat to try to peer back at the safehouse. "Will everyone..."

"They'll be fine." The trucks had disappeared into the darkness, extinguishing their headlights as they went, absolutely melting into the night like evaporating mist.

Demetri similarly drove without light - Nina had no idea how he could see where he was going. But then, in the Wasteland, could it matter much? The needle on the spedometer wavered around the highest point, but Demetri still looked as calm as he ever had.

"I would ask you how you slept," he said, almost apologetic. "But I fear it might seem a stupid question."

Nina could not stop herself from grinning. "A _fucking _stupid question?"

Demetri groaned. "Oh, don't."

"Apologies, your Highness..."

"Your Majesty."

Nina looked at him in surprise. In the dark - the only light in the cab emanated from the tiny face of the silent radio - she could see the shadows of contusions and cicatrices on his face, where he had removed the makeup that they had used to hide his injuries on the Report. It made him so much more human, she thought, seeing him so up close. It was the little things, the things that you only ever glimpsed in the gloom when you were close enough to touch: the tiniest dusting of freckles along the highest point of his cheekbone, the ghost of adolescent acne on his jawline, a tiny silver scar beside his right eye like a childhood wound that had never healed, a very light shadow of stubble. Very normal.

"Your Majesty?" she echoed.

"Your Highness is a title for princes, princesses, consorts. People who aren't the king." Demetri smiled. "Or queen."

"My apologies, your Majesty..."

"Or you could just call me Demetri."

Nina said, quite slowly, "could I?"

He made a face. "Everyone else does."

"Clearly not everyone, _Dimi_."

"You're making fun of me," Demetri said with a dry laugh. "But that is far from the worst of them."

"You can't just say that and not _tell _me some of the worst ones."

"I can," Demetri said. "And, Lady Nina, I will."

Nina found herself, almost against her will, relaxing. He was normal. Of course, she couldn't say that she could imagine him in the mines of home - though, she could not help but notice now how calloused his hands were, more suited to a pickaxe than a sceptre. He was handsome, but she could see now how he had managed to survive as a rebel for so long: it was in the set of his jaw, the strength of his shoulders, the shrewdness of his eyes poorly disguised by his automatic bright smile. More a leader than a king, she was starting to believe.

All around them, an ocean of black. She could see nothing, could hear nothing. They could have been travelling through space if not for the lack of stars. Demetri seemed to almost read her mind, because he said, "we can put the radio on in a little while. Just not yet."

They were both speaking softly, though they were alone, and competing with the roar of the engine. Somehow it would have seemed wrong to speak normally, in the hush of the dark.

"Be warned," Nina replied. "Just as I judged you for the _fuck _and the _Dimi_..."

"I'd like to see you try." Demetri cocked his head. "My music taste is famously immune to criticism."

"Famous?" Nina was amused. "Makes it sounds like many have tried."

"_One_ person has tried, many times." Before Nina could ask anything else, Demetri glanced at his watch, jerked the wheel, and pulled up. The sickly green light of the radio faded and died, and left them entirely in darkness. Nina covered her eyes and strained to look out the window, to see where they had stopped. Seemingly without thinking, Demetri unbuckled his seatbelt and hit the button for Nina's as well. "Come on. Quietly," he added with a smile. "We might be able to see it."

"See what?"

Demetri just gestured, and Nina cautiously followed him out of the car. They had not arrived anywhere, she saw with some mild confusion - still the Wastelands, still dark, still just shadows to the left and right and sand underfoot and stars overhead.

Demetri was pulling something out of the trunk. "So," he said, with a slight smile. "We're going to stress Wick out a little bit and take in the sights." He set a bag by the wheel, and shut the trunk; he had a red-and-black blanket in his hands that he shook out over the roof of the car.

Nina spun in a circle and gestured with confusion, unable to hold herself back from seeing the humour in the situation. "Stargazing?" she suggested helplessly.

"Not quite. You seem too pragmatic a girl to appreciate that too much." He held out a hand. "Can I help you up?"

Nina smiled. "Would it be rude to refuse?"

"Enormously," Demetri replied. "But I grew up with Vardi Tayna, so feel free to refuse away."

Nina hadn't known that before. It seemed an unfair advantage to Vardi - or, given that Nina was beginning to understand just how dislikable the Dominica girl could be, maybe it was an unfair _dis_advantage to her that Demetri knew her so well.

He boosted himself up onto the roof of the car, and Nina copied him. Settling herself to sit next to him, she was abruptly and acutely aware of the fact that she was still dressed in what approximated her pyjamas - shorts and a t-shirt and a jacket with a photo inside and her shoes untied. If Demetri had noticed, he had given no indication, for which she was very grateful. She doubted he hadn't seen it, but he seemed quite determined to act the gentleman in this situation. In any case, there wasn't anything she could do now. Nina tried not to worry too much about things that were petty and out of her control.

The night air was cool, but not enormously cold - a welcome relief after the the harsh heat of the daytime. The stars overhead were so much brighter than they ever were in Allens - so bright, and so many. The sky was utterly full of them, from horizon to horizon. They were reflected brightly in Demetri's eyes. When Nina was young, her father, Antony, had told her that stars were nothing more than pinpricks in the cloth of the sky, allowing the light of heaven that lay beyond to shine through. She had never really understood that when she was at home. Now, she kind of thought she got it.

"Did you enjoy dinner?" Demetri had set the bag between them and was pulling a bottle from it.

Nina shook her head. "Those dresses were... very tight."

Even in the dark, she could tell that Demetri was holding back a smile. She thought that if she was one of the other rebels, he might have made a joke. Before tonight, she wouldn't have imagined that the king had a sense of humour that wasn't scripted.

Instead, he simply replied, "I feel that, as your king, I am not permitted to comment."

"That seems wise, your Majesty."

He rolled his eyes and handed her a sandwich, followed immediately by a bottle of beer that he had opened with the tip of his key. It was so oddly charming - this was what Nina had expected from a Selection, but distorted somehow, fancy picnics replaced with sandwiches and booze on a car in the middle of the night.

"Did you make this?"

"Is it good?"

Nina tore into it. "It's _fantastic_."

"Then yes, I made it." Demetri tilted his head back; for a moment, Nina thought he was watching the skies, but after a few moments he pointed to something moving very quickly overhead. "Can you see that?"

"See what?" She thought that she could hear it, whatever it was - like a rattling intake of breath as a shadow passed between them and the stars.

"It's gone." Demetri gestured straight ahead of them. "Should be just another moment..."

Nina took a swig of the beer he had offered her and then nearly leapt from her own skin as the night abruptly exploded on the horizon. A flash of red lit up the night sky, accompanied by a billowing mushroom of white and grey smoke that billowed up to eclipse the constellations overhead. Even this far away, there was a deep rumble, like the sky itself was roaring. She had only a moment to compose herself before there was another explosion, this one accompanied by the screaming of rending metal and the rumble of falling stones.

Demetri propped up his knee on the edge of the car's roof, and rested his forearm on it, spinning a bottle of water between his fingers. Designated driver, Nina thought with amusement. "That was a good one."

Nina drew in a deep breath of night air. "Airstrike?"

Demetri nodded. "Ysabel wants blood."

"And everyone got out okay?"

"Absolutely everyone."

Nina allowed herself to relax a little. Then there was another explosion - a white-bright starburst of light, followed by another, followed by another.

Demetri said, "they're really giving us hell, aren't they?"

"They're being... very thorough." And then another, and then another - the entire horizon was ablaze, and burning, and then was bombed a second and third time, and then a seventh and an eight time, and the entire sky of stars was obscured by flame.

For a long time, Nina had done her best to help the rebel cause in her hometown - supplying coal, forging numbers, hiding contraband in the mines. It hadn't stemmed from any great opposition to the kingdom, any great hatred of the king, or indeed, any great love for Demetri, but had been fed by a general exhaustion of the system that demanded her community fed its men and women to the mines in a ceaseless blood tithe without ever satiating it appetite. She had been willing to countenance any alternative to the status quo, and the Kingdom in Exile had represented one such alternative.

For the first time, Nina thought that she understood just how badly the queen Ysabel wanted them dead.

For a second time, Demetri seemed to read her mind. "It's weird," he said. "But moments like these always make me feel... very wanted."

Another burst of light and heat, all red and black.

"Wanted?" Nina took another drag from the bottle. "That is a little weird."

"Look how much effort they're putting into trying to kill me." Demetri gestured to the red flowers of fire unfurling at the edge of the world, and Nina laughed so hard she thought she was going to spit back out her beer.

"Are you so starved of compliments that you'll take _that_?"

Demetri rolled his eyes. "You've met the people I call friends."

Nina smiled and leaned back on her hands. And the miner and the king sat on their car in silence for a very long moment, watching as their safehouse burned.

The wastelands were behind them, dark and deep and unknowable. An inferno lay in front of them, roaring and aglow. And yet, the stars still spun and shone overhead, bright and somehow hopeful.

Nina rather thought it an apt comparison to the Selection as a whole so far.

* * *

The darkness in which the girls had huddled was suddenly broken by a very harsh white light as the doors were hauled open by two rebels. Liz blinked in the sudden light, her head spinning slightly. She felt abruptly more blind than she had been, even plunged into the total darkness of the freight hold - at least in the dark, you were secure in knowing that everyone was as blind as you were. Now there were rebels hauling the girls from the body of the truck, not all of them being gentle, pulling their arms and pushing them by their shoulders this way and that way, and though Liz had dared to hope that they might have reached their destination, she realized abruptly with some disappointment that they were still very much in the middle of nowhere - no, she thought, not entirely in the middle of the nowhere, for as she took a few hesitant steps photos she almost tripped over the long iron line of a railway track, leading from nothing to nowhere.

She hadn't even paid attention to who she was travelling with - they had all stayed silent during the trip. She knew Lissa was not among them, because the blonde girl had been directed away to a different vehicle almost as soon as they had exited the building together, and had flung only a quick goodbye over her shoulder towards Liz as she went. _The eltwins_, some of the other Selected had taken to calling them, L and L, rarely parted. Lissa was bubbly, and impulsive, and sometimes very, _very _odd, but she was genuine in a way no one else in this Selection seemed to be, and Liz was enormously glad to see her silhouette outlined in sharp white light over by another one of the trucks.

They were being split up again. Not all of the girls were here, but where _was_ here? Liz had managed to sleep after a few hours - anyone who could nap on the floor of the barn in the spring during lambing season or who could sleep through the screams of cattle in weaning season learned to sleep anywhere at anytime - and so the time had melted by, totally immeasurable, but she could tell that it was no longer the sheer scrub of the Wasteland underfoot but a slightly more tailored surface. Once domesticated land now gone wild, she thought, rather than never-tamed wilderness. Had they travelled right out of the Wasteland, up into the threshold of the southern provinces?

Mouchard, the rat-faced rebel with an almost incomprehensibly thick Wastelands accent, was making the divisions with surgical precision. Liz didn't recognise most of the rebels around them: scowling men with bandanas over their mouths and their rifles lying ready in their arms, like they were expecting the girls to make a run for it, like they didn't want the girls to see their faces. She could not perceive the friendly smile of Uzokuwa or Uzohola, the wry and darting eyes of Anzu, the jovial distraction of Phineas and Mikhail, the warmth of Wick, or even the aloof watchfulness of Thiago Wesick - and abruptly, Liz realised just how well she had come to know the rebellion during the past two weeks, and how much she hoped that nothing would happen to them on this strange, turbulent night.

Some of the girls, Soledad and Saran and Eden, were being directed down along the railway, with one of the men trailing behind them ("follow the lines, instructions will follow you"); Atiena was pointed towards one car, Ekaitza to another; Lissa was being herded back towards the truck, although thankfully she was being directed towards the cab rather than the body.

Liz had a strange feeling weighing down her heart that she was seeing some of these girls for the last time.

This was insanity. Why were they being split up again, sent wandering in the dark? If the evacuation had been so urgent, why were they taking the time to split up into groups when they could have just _kept driving? _

"Malone!" Mouchard shouted over his shoulder. "You take this one. Lady Opal, you'll be travelling with Theo here..."

Liz was standing closest to Opal, and thought it likely that she was the only one who saw the way that Opal's eyes widened, how the colour seemed to drain from her face, how her lips parted and all the breath seemed to escape from behind her ribs. Was she scared? Liz set her jaw and searched the ranks of the rebels for who might have frightened her but no - Opal wasn't scared, she was angry, angry and, if the confusion in her eyes was any indication, slightly unsure, slightly relieved.

She knew him, Liz thought. She knew this Theo guy.

Theo put his hand on Opal's shoulder. He spoke softly. "Opal, come on..." She shook him off.

Liz interrupted quickly. "I'll go with you, Mr Malone. Opal can go in the truck with Lissa, it's fine."

Mouchard was frowning at them through the fabric covering his mouth. "Were my orders unclear, ladies?"

"It's fine." Opal had put back her shoulders and taken a few steps back; she met Theo's gaze levelly. Liz could not help but admire her a little. "It's fine. You go with Lissa, Liz. I wouldn't want to be the one to split up the eltwins. I'll see you at the safehouse."

Liz could not help but hesitate. Just walk away?

Opal offered her an encouraging smile. "Don't worry."

Liz rolled her eyes. "You clearly don't know me very well."

She reached over and squeezed Opal's hand very briefly, her meaning clear - _stay safe, stay sane, don't be a martyr_ \- and then Mouchard was calling and the truck's lights were lighting up and Liz had to sprint over to the cab to jump into the seat before they could pull away without her. Lissa held the door open for her; Liz climbed in, slammed the door shut, and felt her bones shake from their joints as the skeleton of the truck rattled into life.

Lissa was looking at her concernedly. "You okay, Liz?"

Liz nodded hesitantly. "Yeah, I'm fine. I just..."

"What is it?"

"I don't want to be superstitious," Liz said softly. "But..."

She shrugged.

"I just feel like we're never going to see some of them again."

* * *

If this Selection was good for anything, it was getting Liara used to disappointment. First had been the so-called date with Demetri. Now, she felt like she was being betrayed all over again.

Vardi Tayna slipped off the back of the motorcycle that had just pulled into the courtyard, and the dog that Liara had been petting bolted away from her to tackle the smaller southern girl, his body appearing to vibrate like he was at risk of spontaneous combustion out of sheer excitement at seeing a new friend to play with. _Was_ it a new friend? Vovve the collie had been overjoyed to see Atiena and Liara arrive at the little workshop an hour ago, but the way he greeted Vardi Tayna now reminded Liara of those videos where a soldier's dog sees him return from war. He looked like he would have leapt into her arms if he had still been young enough to jump.

For her part, Vardi Tayna didn't seem inclined to push him away, but crouched down to fuss over him as the motorcycle roared back to life, and the rebel riding it careened back out of the compound as quickly as he had arrived. Atiena watched it go with narrowed eyes; she was leaning against the frame of the house's backdoor, while Liara sat on the top step, her arms hanging over her knees. She wasn't sure Vardi Tayna had seen them, so busy was she talking nonsense in that way that people did when dogs were around ("aren't you lovely, aren't you such a good girl, I missed you so much"), but if she had not noticed them, then she did a good job of hiding realisation of their presence as she straightened, hefted her bag on one shoulder, and crossed the courtyard to greet them.

She didn't seem inclined to say anything to them until Liara spoke first. "Bit of a handful, huh."

"Ah, Bruce always is always a bit excitable."

"What did you call him?" Liara asked.

Vardi Tayna looked blank. "_Her _name is Bruce." At Liara and Atiena's confusion, she elaborated, "like Bruce Springsteen?"

Liara chuckled. "I thought his name was Vovve."

_"Vovve?_ Who told you that?"

"Täj," Atiena said casually. "He seemed pretty confident about it."

Vardi Tayna paused. She shrugged. "When is he not?" Her voice was flat; it did not escape Liara's notice that she seemed a little uncomfortable, a little thornier than even she typically was. "But confident doesn't mean _right_."

"Guys! What is Cuckoo barking at?" Their hostess was calling from within the house, but Liara could hear her footsteps approaching.

Vardi Tayna frowned. "Is that _Raphael_ in there?"

Raphael, contrary to the name, was one of the most beautiful women that Liara had ever glimpsed - tall and strong and broad-shouldered, with hands that seemed better suited to wielding a sword than making clocks. Her hair was a true, deep gold, her eyes a dark moss green, her skin an even olive from time spent in the sun. She had a wide mouth that she used to smile liberally, and thick brows that seemed twice as expressive as the rest of her. Right now, she was beaming. "Little liar," Raphael sang as she stepped out onto the back step, and Vardi Tayna slipped forward to give her a hug, barely coming up to the other woman's collarbone.

"Hey, Rafa." The softness in Vardi Tayna's voice just reminded Liara of how far behind the rest of the Selected girls were when it came to getting a glimpse into Demetri's world. How could they hope to compete with someone who had grown up at his side, who knew every rebel, who greeted all of Demetri's allies with a smile and a hug and a nickname? If Demetri had never been stolen, if he had been raised in the palace as he ought to have been, if he had held a Selection as his father had before him, would it have been fair to let Liara enter?

Would she have wanted to?

"Haven't seen you in _forever_." Raphael released Vardi Tayna so that she could assess the younger girl as she had assessed Atiena and Liara when they had arrived - _are you tired, are you hungry, you look a little low_. "How are my boys?"

"You know the answer to that already." Vardi Tayna took a step back; she had to tilt her face right up to meet Raphael's eyes. She spoke softly; Liara had to strain to listen. "I'm surprised you're letting us stay. It means a lot, Rafa."

"Don't be silly. Family sticks together in an emergency. Petty arguments don't mean much." Raphael laughed. "Besides, Agares can't wait to meet you all. She's never forgiven me for letting you guys miss the wedding."

"We were," Vardi Tayna said dryly. "Setting up a country at the time, Rafa."

"You can't take _one night_ off setting up a country? You're as bad as this supposed king of ours." Raphael had already, deaf to Vardi Tayna's protestations, relieved her of her bag, and was guiding her into the house. "No escaping us now, I'm afraid. You okay in the basement? That boy of yours didn't give us much notice, so we're a little tight on space... It's just the five of you staying, isn't it?"

Vardi Tayna looked to Atiena and Liara for confirmation. Atiena frowned. "Us, Täj..."

"Oh, there's some other girl staying here as well." Raphael waved her hand. "Tried to talk our man himself into staying with us but it was all _kingdom _this and _revolution _that and _leader_the other, you know how he is."

Vardi Tayna laughed, but there was an edge of tiredness to it. She looked exhausted, Liara thought. She hadn't seen the other girl since the manic fleeing of the safehouse a day ago. Or had it been two days ago? In any case, she looked a little worse for the wear. Liara had found their journey boring, but not all that unpleasant - Täj and Atiena had kept up a quiet stream of conversation at the front of the car, while Liara had gazed out the window at the ceaseless stream of nothingness that sped past them. Eventually, that nothingness had given way to _something_: first, paved roads, and then small villages that were nothing more than a small smattering of shops and houses around a dusty square, and then finally they were in a bona fide town with cobbled streets and windows aglow with warm golden light and people sitting outside little cafes with cups of coffees.

"Where are we?" Liara had asked, and Täj had left it to Atiena to answer.

"It's a rebel town," Atiena had said, unable to keep back the note of admiration that crept into her voice. "A town of the Kingdom in Exile."

Liara had stared out the window. Everything looked so _normal_. After so long in the Wastelands, she had almost forgotten that the rebellion was making strides to maintain a semblance of legitimacy; false king or not, she couldn't deny that this could have been a town in Angeles, with couples walking hand-in-hand on the street, parents and children shopping at open-air markets, people on their way to work swerving and careening on bikes around the traffic that congested the main shopping street.

Raphael's house had similarly seemed exceedingly normal, after the strange, eerie emptiness of the safehouse. She occupied a small shop-front in a tiny side alley, with a hanging basket of red-and-purple flowers on either side of her door. She had been sitting on the porch when Täj pulled up beside the shop, looking like she hadn't decided whether to be friendly or not. She clearly made up her mind once she caught sight of Liara and Atiena - Liara didn't think either of them were the types of girls to seem like they needed to be looked after, but clearly something about their appearance had softened Raphael's reticence, for it had taken her only a few moments to start brewing them tea and doling out soup and sending her wife, Agares, rooting in the attic for extra blankets.

Vardi Tayna didn't seem to be getting any of this special treatment.

"You know where you're heading, don't you?" Raphael gestured indoors. "I'll let you go get settled. Try to walk lightly, Täj is asleep upstairs and you know how this house complains if you don't move soft."

Something flickered in Vardi Tayna's eyes but she nodded. Liara watched her disappear into the bowels of the house.

Atiena pushed off the doorframe and walked out a little further into the courtyard to squat down and fuss over the dog, who was still lying where Vardi Tayna had left him. Atiena had said earlier that he - or was it, as Vardi Tayna insisted, a she? - reminded her of the strays that sometimes took to hanging out around the Morris house, knowing that they would be fed and minded by the family for as long as they wished to stick around. Liara wondered if the girl from Tammins was thinking of home. She wondered if girls like Atiena Morris ever got homesick. She had never seen her nervous, or awkward, or uncertain. Even Täj seemed to become more comfortable when he was around her.

Raphael sat down beside Liara. "I made you some tea," she said, quite without prompting, as she passed the Angeles girl a mug. "Hope you don't mind - just thought you looked a little stressed."

Liara accepted it with a polite nod. "Thank you, Mrs...?"

"Raphael," Raphael said, without preamble. "Please don't stand on ceremony, Liara. I want you girls to be comfortable while you're staying here - for however long that may be."

"You don't know?"

"The rebellion doesn't always see fit to tell me these things. They need my house, so they use it. When they don't, they won't."

Liara inhaled deeply, and appreciated the sweet aroma of the tea - honey and caramel, she thought, like the perfume her mother has worn when she was a child. "You mean you're not a member of the rebellion? The Kingdom in Exile?" If Demetri was not around, she thought that an acceptable alternative might be to speak to those who knew him.

"I am a citizen of the Kingdom in Exile," Raphael replied. "And I am proud of that. But I left the rebellion behind a very long time ago."

"Can I ask you why?"

Raphael was not drinking tea, but coffee; she took a long drink of that now, almost like she wanted to give herself time to think of an answer. However, when she did reply, Liara could detect absolutely no mistruth in her words. "I think there comes a point where we tire of the fight. The bloodshed. The constant demand for blood, for sacrifice. I'm saying this to you, because if you are to become queen of this Kingdom, then you ought to know what it took to build it. What it takes to sustain it." Raphael looked at her cup. "He called me a coward when I walked away from it all, you know."

Liara blanched. "Demetri?" Even having met the new, older Demetri, the man who was coldest when he thought no one was looking, she still could not help but think of the smaller, more cautious boy that he had been, all pale green eyes and grazed knees, asking her if she was okay after a fall into the fountain in the palace courtyards, doting over the oldest horse in the stables even when it was not strong enough to stand to greet him, helping Mordred to reach the lowest branches of the trees so that they could try to climb over the wall into the forbidden rose garden that had been Jael's.

How could one have become the other?

Raphael hesitated a second time. "I don't think he was entirely wrong. I still get to reap the benefits of what they're fighting for, without putting anything on the line. You know, I live in this nice town and I know that I'm safe in my house at night. My wife and I live quietly. Men and women die out of sight, and all for this. So that I can buy fresh bread in the morning."

"How old were you when...?"

"I was twenty when I gave up the fight. Twenty, and I wasn't sure I would live to twenty one."

Liara didn't know what she could say to that. Raphael smiled at the younger girl's apparent loss for words, and took another sip of her coffee.

"This is what they're fighting for. I think it's important that you get to see that. That it's not all... dust and ashes, like the palace wants you to believe. It's not just the Wastelands. There are families being raised in the Kingdom. People fall in love here. They are born here, and they die here."

"Like in the north."

"Almost. The north was built on the carcass of Illéa. The south is its own beast."

Liara took another deep breath, and watched Atiena coax the dog closer to her. "You were close to Demetri? Before you left?"

Raphael laughed. "Yeah, you could say that."

Liara didn't get the opportunity to ask for further clarification to this enigmatic response, because at that very moment, Agares, her red hair covered, put her head out the back door to say that dinner was ready if the girls wanted to come in to join them, she wasn't going to wake Täj because hadn't the poor man looked half-dead with exhaustion, and they should probably bring Juk indoors because he might try to chase cats into the streets if he wasn't watched closely.

Raphael stood and offered Liara a hand to help her up. "Don't let anything I've told you scare you off. The king has brought you here for a reason. He has shown you the Wastelands; now he wants you to see the Kingdom in truth. I wouldn't be surprised if he intends to move you north once he has narrowed you down to the Elite."

"If I stay that long."

Raphael's smile reminded Liara of Demetri's - it was bright, and sweet, and somehow warming. You had the feeling nothing bad could happen to you while that smile was being directed your way. "I don't think you have anything to worry about, Liara."

Liara brushed away the compliment, and managed to hold back the suspicion from her voice. "How do you figure?"

"It's simple." Raphael whistled, and the dog with no true name loped across the courtyard to put its head under her hand and whine for scratches. It had a collar on, with a silver tag spelling out a name no one had used: _FESTE_. Beneath that, another word that had nearly worn through, letters missing: _ga r e _. "He wouldn't have let you meet _me _unless you were in with an _excellent_ chance."

* * *

"Täj. You awake?"

She half expected to see the glow of a lit cigarette in the darkness if he was, but the room was awash in gloom even as he replied, "no, I'm not."

"You're _hilarious_."

The springs on the bed protested as he rolled over. Through the crack in the door, a thin slice of wan light fell across his face, illuminating a single pale green eye, the sharp edge of his cheek, his pale fair hair, falling across his forehead in a loose wave. She paused, and then she slipped into the room and shut the door behind her. Climbing onto his bed was strangely intimately familiar - like the past fifteen years had melted away and they were mere children once more, stranded in the hinterlands among wolves with only one another to rely on. Täj was as awkward as ever he was, but it was a rustiness, not a discomfort, as Vardi Tayna slipped down to lie next to him and he stiffly moved, limbs still heavy with sleep, to put his arm around her waist and settle his cheek against her hair. His heartbeat was slow and steady. He smelled like smoke and sage.

"I think," Täj murmured. "This is against the rules."

"Of the Selection?" He could feel her laugh reverberating through her bones. His bones as well. Almost like a shudder. She was thinner than she had been. "Yeah. I think it is."

"Not like us to break the rules."

"No. Imagine. My reputation might never recover." She intertwined her fingers with his and let out a deep sigh, snuggling deeper into the thin mattress. "You got a better bed than me."

"Perks of the position."

"Ugh. Nepotism."

He was silent for such a long moment she thought he might have fallen asleep. "Täj? What is it?"

"Are you okay, Tayna?"

"In general?" Vardi Tayna's voice was still rough from weariness.

"In general."

"Yeah. I'm fine."

In the dark, he smiled. "Selection going well?"

He felt her lips graze his skin, by his wrist. "Selection not going badly."

He imagined not. The strange small rebel girl getting one of the first dates with King Demetri had been a topic of much conversation in the camp. _Our Vardi Tayna might be queen yet, _had been thrown about a few times. "Demetri's a lucky guy."

"You reckon?"

"You don't?"

She dug her elbow very gently into his ribs, but he could tell that she was smiling. Questions on top of questions. "I reckon," Vardi Tayna said softly. "That Atiena's a very lucky girl."

His laugh was low and husky. "Why do you sound like that?"

"I don't sound like anything."

They both knew she was lying.

For her part, she thought he might say something further. Thought he was going to ask her something.

Questions on top of questions.

Instead, he just said, very softly, "Shut up and go to sleep, T."

And for once, she did not argue further.


	11. I: flew in feathers then

**flew in feathers then**

_I remember, I remember, the fir trees dark and high;_  
_I used to think their slender tops were close against the sky:_  
_It was a childish ignorance, but now 'tis little joy_  
_To know I'm farther off from heav'n than when I was a boy._

\- Thomas Hood

* * *

For many weeks, they had kept the children in an old shipping container on the edge of the Wastelands, where they would at least be in the shade, and over the days the other boys disappeared, all of them, quite gradually, until there was only maybe ten of them left in total, out of what had once been more than thirty - seven of the children in the container, and three, slightly older, children left to guard them. _Like Lord of the Flies_, Demetri had said, thinking himself quite insightful, and had been rewarded with quite the blank stare from both Gabriel and Yenifer in response.

He thought Yenifer would have given him such a stare even if she knew exactly what he was talking about - she delighted in making a fool out of him when she could, him and everyone else. She wasn't even meant to be there. She was the only girl there. The General had put her in with the others in a fit of exasperation, when he could find no one else in the local militia willing to take charge of the little captive, who was prone to spitting and biting and using words no child should have encountered before they had lost all of their baby teeth. So the General put her into the cage with the rest.

It was that, or put her in the ground.

Some days, Demetri thought that he rather would have preferred the latter.

Well, he didn't mean that. He _couldn't _mean that. Yenifer was not nice to him, but she would not stand for anyone else to be mean to him either. She had slashed at Uzohola with a broken piece of glass, earlier in the week, when the bigger boy had shouted at Demetri, and would give Demetri her food when she thought he was looking hungry, and was forever convincing Raphael to give them this or that, little things that the General wouldn't let them have, like the gold chain that had been taken from Demetri after his kidnapping that he said had been his mother's or the raggy coat that Gabriel still couldn't sleep without or Yenifer's screwdriver, with which she had stabbed Thiago Wesick in the shoulder several weeks ago and which she now used to draw pictures in the sand. "What are you drawing, little sparrow?" the General asked her once, when he had visited to see the boys were being treated well, and Yenifer had pulled a face and said "Steve McQueen, boss, Steve McQueen".

The General always went to great lengths to assure Gabriel and Demetri that they were not prisoners, not captives, but just being kept safe. Then he always sighed and put a hand over his face and pointed at Yenifer and said "but _she _is a caged dog".

Yenifer had barked.

Gabriel had not been able to hold back his laughter, and after a moment neither had the General. Demetri always looked very serious, and rarely smiled, but he had patted Yenifer on her head, which was his own way of being funny, and the indignant look on little Yenny's face had been enough to make the General laugh even harder.

Demetri liked the General. When he came to visit, he would give Gabriel a copy of the Axiom to pore over to practise his reading and a red marker to point out all the mistakes ("see how they don't mention the massacre in Waverly?"), and slip Yenifer a few sweets that struck Demetri as far too bitter to truly count as candy. He would pat Demetri on the shoulder and ask him how he was doing, and sometimes when Demetri was listening in on the General's chats with Uzohola and Uzokuwa and Raphael, he would overhear the General using the sorts of phrases that Trajan always had. It was familiar. It was nice. And anyway, the General was nicer than the generals he had known in the palace, like Liara's stern, imposing father who always looked very angry and always pushed past his daughter and wife at state functions, all the better to speak directly to the king and queen.

Liara.

Demetri liked Yenifer and Gabriel just fine, but they were pale facsimiles of what Demetri had known at the palace, like when Ysabel had replaced Demetri's favourite goldfish after it had died, like they were _interchangeable_, like he wouldn't know the _difference_. Gabriel was friendly and funny, but he was not Mordred. He was not Demetri's brother. Yenifer was sharp and bold, but she was not Liara. She was not Demetri's best friend. They never would be. And he knew that they were not looking for him to be anything in particular, did not care if he took a role in their trio or didn't - Yenifer had pretended not to know what the word "friend" meant, when it was first mentioned, and Gabriel had his sisters, of whom Raphael was just one.

Demetri thought Raphael was very pretty, and that seemed to annoy Gabriel and Yenifer equally - Gabriel, because no little boy wanted his friend to think his older sister was pretty, and Yenifer, because she wanted Demetri to think _she _was pretty. But that was different - Yenifer was the same age as he was, and perpetually grimy, like she had just rolled in soil, her hair wild, eyes scowling, clothes torn, dead rats in her pockets. Raphael was tall and blonde and nice. She reminded Demetri a little bit of Ysabel, how she always knew what to say, and always knew when it was best to say nothing.

Demetri missed Ysabel. He missed everyone at the palace. He wanted to go home, but the General always said that it wasn't safe. He had shown Demetri a letter from the king, Demetri's father, asking for Demetri to be taken away and kept safe far away from Angeles. Demetri would have known the wax stamp of his father's ring absolutely anywhere - he had always been fascinated by Trajan's signet ring, how heavy and imposing it was, how intricate the carving on its face, and quietly delighted when his father had promised it to him. "When you become king, this ring will be yours." They had been sitting in the study, very near Demetri's bedtime, and the only light in the room had come from the fire under the mantelpiece and the lone candle that Trajan always kept lit on the windowsill as a tribute to Jael.

"Like the kingdom will be mine?"

"No. The kingdom will never be yours, Demetri. It will never belong to you. You will be the kingdom's. You will _serve_it, not own it."

Semantics, as far as Mordred was concerned, when Demetri had told him the next day, just adults mixing up words like they always did and being pleased with themselves at how very philosophical they were being. Liara had looked a little more thoughtful, but had conceded it meant nothing to her, not in any real meaningful sense.

Of course, Gabriel had known exactly how to explain it, prefacing his sentence, as he always did with, "well, my sister says..."

"Which sister?" Demetri and Yenifer always asked.

Sometimes Demetri thought Gabriel was just making these names up, because he would just fling one out ("oh, it was Eremiel" or "oh, it was Zadkiel" or "oh, it was Mike") and continue on, quite undeterred, each phrase pronounced with an unerring confidence: "_anyway_, my sister says that the monarchy is a reactionary institution that appropriates from the commons of the proletariat and that anyone who claims to lead a nation should be a servant of the worker classes."

Demetri had thought about this pronouncement for a long moment, trying to parse the long words.

"Your sister clearly has a larger vocabulary than you, Gabe," Yenifer had said, quite bluntly.

Gabriel had made a face at her, and Demetri half-thought that the two were about to fight one another, as they frequently were on the verge of doing (and Uzohola was about to place a bet on Gabriel losing badly, as he was wont to gamble liberally on the outcome of absolutely anything) but instead Raphael had called them over for their lunch and the childish insult was forgotten for the rest of the day.

Eventually the time came for them to be moved from the shipping container, and Gabriel had insisted quite forcefully that the three of them be put together, so they were: Gabriel, whose entire family had turned to rebellion, and Yenifer, who was not of the rebellion or of the Crown but something different and wilder, and Demetri, the boy king. Another of the boys, Herry, was put into their group, so there was four altogether. They mostly walked, as they had mostly walked before, when it had just been the General and Demetri walking away from the palace, away from Illéa. Sometimes they travelled by car over the border, the boys together with Raphael pretending to be their mother and the General in the car behind them with Uzohola and Yenifer.

Every so often they slept overnight at rebel camps, sometimes in sleeping bags outside underneath the stars, sometimes in bunk beds that would shudder as though in an earthquake anytime someone got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. Yenifer wasn't able to sleep if any of the rebels were staying in the same room as them; she said she could feel them staring at her during the night, even when they had their eyes closed. Demetri would be half-asleep in his assigned bed and feel her climb in next to him, and say, quite stubbornly, "we're gonna Shawshank this place, Demusha, just you wait and see" and Demetri would say, "I still don't know know what that means, Yenny" and she would make an exasperated sound and make an abrupt attempt to snatch all of the blankets that usually ended in one of them falling out of the bed and Gabriel almost falling out of his, wheezing with laughter.

Yenifer was fond of making these pronouncements, but Demetri had never quite known what they meant until they were staying in a rebel encampment very close to the capital city of Paloma, so close that he could see the smoke rising from the chimneys of its houses, see the glint of its skyscrapers, almost feel the buzz of movement, of _people_within. They had been at the camp for six days; their guard, Uzohola, was starting to get restless and talk about moving on. The children were usually left to their own devices, and Yenifer had taken to milling about beside the chicken-wire fence that encircled the temporary settlement; they were staying in what had once been an Illéan military base, and still bore the signs of the same - the barracks were much nicer than any the boys had been given before. Demetri always thought of them like that, the boys, and counted Yenny among their number, and it was so automatic an assumption that when he woke that night and found her missing, it was an automatic realisation, utterly unquestioned. Yenifer wasn't there. Where had she gone?

She almost made him jump when she appeared at the side of his bed, looking like a wraith in the dark, her eyes little black pits. "You ready?"

"Ready?" It was Gabriel who spoke, from the bunk across the room. "What do you mean, ready?"

"Rita Hayworth, baby!" Even hissed, Yenifer's excitement was almost palpable. "Let's rock, let's roll."

Their whispering had woken Herry, who was a pale and pinched boy with almost white-blonde hair and a tendency to fret when things went wrong and when things went right. He began doing so almost immediately ("we're meant to be asleep, Uzohola will be so angry if he hears us") but Gabriel did what Gabriel did best, which was ignoring people Gabriel didn't want to deal with, and put on his shoes immediately, saying to Demetri, "do you know what she's talking about?"

He didn't.

But he followed her anyway. And Gabriel followed them, and Herry followed Gabriel, and pretty soon the boys were all shivering beside the chicken-wire iron fence that surrounded the base and noticing, for the first time, the sizable hole that Yenifer had cut into it, just large enough for her to slip through. "The main entrances are all guarded," she whispered, and demonstrated just how easily a girl as tiny as her could slip out into freedom just beyond. "But we're only about two or three miles from the city. We could run it."

"Why would we want to? We should go _back_." Herry again.

Yenifer laced her fingers through the wire on the fence and leaned into it, her face cracked open by a smile. "Why wouldn't we?"

Gabriel sounded like the last thing he wanted to do was agree with Herry but he nodded, quite cautiously. "It sounds dangerous."

"More dangerous than staying here? Ending up on those stretchers?" They had seen injured rebels carried into the camp earlier in the day, bleeding and groaning and crying for their mothers. Yenifer had said "why don't they put a bullet in them to quiet them?" and Gabriel had nearly fought her all over again, his eyes shining and angry at her callous pronouncement. The General had gone to be with the young men as they were operated upon, to hold their hands and tell them how important their missions had been, and the children had been, for a few long moments, quite forgotten. Demetri imagined that it was this lapse in watchfulness that had allowed Yenifer to finish her sabotage of the fence and stash the canvas bag behind that cluster of rocks, which she was pulling out now and slinging over one shoulder.

Yenifer shook her head. "I've been planning this since we arrived. It'll only take us... maybe three days."

"Three days? Three days to do what?" Herry's voice was high and strident, an underlying frisson of panic underlining every word, like he was on the verge of collapse. Demetri hadn't realised it was _possible_for him to become even paler, but he was aglow like a ghost in this moment.

Yenifer sounded like she thought this a very stupid question. "Get back to the palace, of course?"

Gabriel blanched. "The _palace_?"

Demetri whispered, "the palace?"

She nodded. Her dark eyes were very full of stars. "I know how much you miss them, Demetri." Yenifer's voice was whisper-soft. "Your palace. Your family. Your Liara." How could such a young girl sound so persuasive, so manipulative? What was she going to get out of helping Demetri home? Why did she want to run so badly? Had she seen some reward being offered on the cover of one of Gabriel's copies of the Axiom? Did she just want to just not be _here _anymore? Or could this possibly just be kindness on her part? "I'll help you get home."

"Yenny, stop it." Gabriel's voice was very low, and almost frightened. "Stop it. You know the palace isn't..."

"I don't know anything about the royal family and neither do you! All you do is repeat what your sisters say. Families belong together. People should be allowed to go _home_." Yenifer slipped her hand through the fence and reached for Demetri. "I promise. We'll go together."

"Yenifer, _stop_..."

"You can come with us, Gabe, come on. All of us." Yenifer flung a very desperate look over her shoulder, searching the darkness for anyone approaching. "You really want to spend the rest of your life in a cage? Bleeding for them? Dying for them?"

"I can't... Demetri, you shouldn't..."

Herry's voice, very strained. "I'm going to go tell Uzohola. I'm going to get the General."

"Then _go _and _shut up_!" Gabriel had clearly used up every ounce of his patience.

Yenifer said, very softly, "Demetri, don't you want to go home?"

And he took her hand.

Slipping through the fence was almost as easy as she had made it look. The air didn't taste any different on the other side, but Yenifer held his hand very tightly, and the stars were very bright over their head.

"Gabriel," Yenifer said softly. "Please -"

"Gabe," Demetri whispered. "Come on..."

Lights blazed up in the rest of the military installation, white-bright and blinding, like a supernova. Gabriel froze, his face a perfect etching of fear and uncertainty. Demetri wanted to hold his hand out to the other boy. He wanted to convince him to come back to the palace, to climb apple trees with Mordred and sneak cookies from the kitchen with Liara and while away their childhood in simple, innocent ways that didn't involve fake names and blood. He wanted the three of them to run together. To get out. To live.

But Gabriel was rooted to the ground, and Raphael was running towards them, her face etched with fear, shouting not for her young king but for her brother, _Gabriel don't do it please don't go_ and Gabriel was frozen and there were silhouettes moving towards them, maybe seeming closer than they really were, and Yenifer was pulling Demetri by the hand and saying,_we have to go we have to go now they're going to catch us if we don't go DEMETRI._

So they ran.

* * *

**As you have hopefully gathered, this is set in a flashback several years before the current continuity. There won't be too many of these chapters (maybe one per ten of the main story) which will hopefully flesh out some of their background and help you in piecing together some of the mysteries that our Selected girls are grappling with in the present. Please do let me know what you thought of this chapter - if it wasn't your thing, don't worry, we will return to our Selected characters next chapter, with some girls getting their first POV sections!**

**Thank you!**

**Hope you enjoyed.**

**\- Izar**


	12. Whitebeams and Wasps

**Chapter 11: Whitebeams and Wasps and Honey-scented Buddleias**

_I knew winter was in store for every leaf on every tree on that road. __Was inescapable for each one we passed.  
__ And for me. It is winter and the stars are hidden._

\- Eavan Boland

* * *

_We gotta stay cool tonight, Eddie, 'cause man, we got ourselves out on that line... and if we blow this one, they ain't gonna be looking for just me this time..._

True to his word, Demetri had switched on the radio once they got back onto the road, and between the music and the movement of the car and the deep gloom of the space within, it was impossible for Nina to stay awake for long. She knew that she should stay awake, especially in the presence of the king, but all that adrenaline that had flooded through her during the air-strike had dissipated just as quickly, and left her drained and sluggish and more than willing to just set her head against the window, cushioned by Demetri's jacket, and let her eyelids slowly flutter shut. Every so often, she would wake and look about and exchange a few soft words with Demetri, and then sleep would take her again and she would fade out for another few hours. Demetri seemed happy to drive - one hand on the wheel, one hand on the radio, spinning between old CDs with scratches that distorted the songs in glitchy tunes and whatever faint radio stations that could be picked up in the Wastelands. Mostly, he stuck to the music; it reminded Nina of the kind of music that would play in the mining bars in Allens, old and heartland.

_Honey, we came to dance with the girls with the stars in their eyes... strike up the band, play a song that everybody knows, if I'm not your kind, then don't tell a soul..._

It was approaching dawn when they reached the new safe-house. The sun was just rising over a distant horizon, a pale imitation of the violent fireworks display that Demetri and Nina had watched together the night before as the scarlet-and-orange light bled over onto the land and stained the grass golden. The car bounced over the earth as they left the desert behind and drove across wide grasslands, churning up wildflowers and clumps of red earth. In front of them, what seemed to be an abandoned military installation rose up, a behemoth of iron wire fencing and cement walls. There were no guards visible, no security measures of any kind surrounding the compound, but Demetri slowed the car anyway as they approached.

Nina glanced at the king. The spectre of sleep still lay heavily on her, but she could not escape noticing how serious Demetri looked, quite abruptly, as they came to a high, wide gate and were waved through by a lone rebel in khaki with a rifle on his back. They pulled in front of one of the smaller buildings, and Nina was equal parts surprised and gratified to see that Sol was standing outside, looking a little harried but no worse for the wear. She had made it out okay. That was good.

"Lady Nina." Demetri's voice was soft. "Thank you very much for accompanying me. It was a pleasure to travel with you."

"And you. Demetri." The familiar name still felt foreign.

"Again? Some time?"

"I would love it."

Demetri smiled at her. "I'll see you soon," he promised, and Nina took that as a key to slide out of the car again, pausing only to set Demetri's jacket back onto the seat. She shut the door, and he leaned over to call through the open window. "Lady Soledad. Lovely to see you again."

"And you," Sol replied politely. As Nina passed her, the two girls clasped hands very briefly in acknowledgement of the other being safe and present and still in the Selection, and then Sol moved to take the seat that had been Nina's, and Demetri accorded Nina just a quick wave before he wrenched the ancient car's gears back into place so that the car spun in an arc, sprayed gravel, and was gone again in the merest moment.

And Nina was left outside an old military bunker in her pyjamas, watching the gates shut in their wake.

* * *

Vardi Tayna was waiting for Wickaninnish Harjo on the top step, outside the watchmaker's door, in jeans and a hoody two sizes too large for her, her dark hair disheveled. She looked more well rested than she had done for several weeks - shadows still present, but not so dark as before. "You know," she said without preamble. "This is a terrible, _terrible _idea."

"Suits you just fine, then." Wick grinned broadly. "I don't think that's your sweater, VT."

"I highly doubt that's _your _lipstick on your collar, Harjo."

"Touché."

VT fell into step next to him as easily as breathing, hands in her pockets, shoulders set against the world like she was ready herself for a boxing match with the clouds. Wick rubbed at the collar of his shirt as they made their way down the serpentine cobbled alley on which Raphel's shop lay, and emerged out onto a wider thoroughfare, lined on both sides by cafes surrounded by hanging baskets. VT said, "I can't help you, you know I can't help you" and Wick rolled his eyes.

"Can't or won't?"

"I'm in the Selection."

"I had noticed that, yeah."

"Yeah?"

Wick shook his head. Yeah, and what a baffling, confusing, frustrating decision that had been. He doubted it had been VT to come up with that idea - she wasn't smart enough for it, bless her - which meant that Täj had asked her, or Demetri had told her, or the General had planted the idea in her skull while she slept, like some sort of germinating seed. VT didn't play by the rules, but there were a few people that she always listened to, and those three were usually good candidates for blame. Those three. Thiago. Sometimes Uzohola, if the mood gripped her.

VT never listened to Wick.

"We need you out here. In the rebellion. That air-strike..."

They walked past a bakery already all abustle with customers despite the relative youth of the day, the air outside fragrant with the scent of fresh bread, its warmth almost palpable even from the street. The library beside it was still closed, its windows shuttered with its blue volet brightly painted with tiny white and yellow daisies. Those had been Wick's idea - something for the children in the orphanage to do in their arts and crafts class, something to brighten to the town. Each business had their own set of shutters, each one brightly coloured in some uniquely colourful and chaotic design. Take this one, the doctor's clinic - all geometric designs in red and dark purple, and an asklepian drawn in broad, clumsy strokes by a child with more enthusiasm than talent, stretched between the two like a bar holding the windows shut. Some of the children had signed their windows - he could still see their smudged initials by the hinges.

At dusk, when all the shops were closed, the town was much brighter and more colourful than it ever was during the day. Wick liked that. It made the entire space feel much safer than it should, with men like him around. They were started to flutter open now, in a wave down the street, just as the gaslight lamps that had lit the night were beginning to die, one by one, almost as though Wick himself were dousing them simply by walking past.

"That air strike," Wick said, shaking his head. "We would have heard about it sooner with you in the field, Vee. I just know it."

"I've missed stuff before."

"Not like this."

In the square, men and women were starting to set up their stalls for that morning's market, fruit spilling across table, fish lying dead-eyed and staring in heaps, bracelets stretched out to glint in the sunrise and books heaped high with pages sticking out at every point. There was a stall selling love potions and a stall selling bullets and a stall selling piping hot coffee and freshly baked _marranitos_, for which Wick began to fish in his pockets to see if he had any coins. The question of the Kingdom in Exile's currency was a controversial one; most rebels still carried coins stamped with the face of the false king, and excused any liberal spending with the same fact. _Couldn't stand to carry him with me any longer_. Wick produced one such coin now ("ugly fucker, int he"), and went over to the nearest stall, while VT paced by the clocktower and glowered at the idea of secrets lying unknown. She kept her head turned away, like she was afraid of the marketholders recognising her face as one of the Selected, who ought not be fraternising - not even with men like the hero Wickaninnish Harjo.

The ladies at the stall were unwilling to take Wick's money, though it was not borne of mistrust or suspicion - they simply threw up their hands and turned their heads and argued with him when he tried to pay, and all but chased him from the stall, saying, "_he liberates our children, he builds our town, and now he wants to pay for his breakfast, can you believe__?_". He left the stall with enough food to feed a small army; as he walked back across the square, he volleyed a _piedra _rock scone at VT's head, and laughed as she ducked without looking.

"Wasteful," she tutted. "There are children starving in Illéa."

"While the liar queen grows fat." He handed her something pink and sugary, which she regarded with some suspicion. "On stolen food. On stolen secrets."

VT peeled a bit of white icing off the cupcake he had given her and put it between her teeth, looking thoughtful. "Thiago and I vetted the girls. All of them. And we've kept them so isolated. Nothing in or out."

"So?"

"So I know what you're suggesting, and you're wrong. None of them are spies. None of them _could _be."

"You heard what Thiago caught?"

"I heard what Täj killed. _Before _they could reach any of the girls."

They continued their walk, VT picking at her cupcake very delicately like it was the last thing she would ever eat and she wanted to make it last as long as possible, consumed crumb by crumb. There was confetti stuck between the cobblestones here, some bright powder staining the pavement yellow and orange, some glitter still clinging to the walls of the neighbouring shops. Someone must have got married recently.

VT said, "why are you talking to me about this? Why not Gogo?"

Wick laughed. He had never known Uzohola to give someone a dignified nickname - it was all _Dimi _this and _Veetee_that and _Wicky-my-darling_. Gogo was a particular magnum opus in that regard. "He's busy."

"He's always busy. That doesn't answer my question."

Wick stopped at the corner of two streets. There was a small green area opposite, squeezed into what little free space the town could afford to sacrifice to leisure and luxury. There was a father and his child there, and a big yellow dog, and they were laughing, and the dog was looking delighted with himself as he charged in and out of the water to splash the child and provoke yet more laughter. It was nice to see, he thought. The inner circle would probably never know that kind of happiness, or peace, or normalcy, but helping to craft that for someone else was reward enough.

At least, in his opinion. He knew VT was not, could not be, so selfless. She was just lacking some small component of her heart which would allow her to make sacrifices for others. Wick loved her anyway. He loved all of the inner circle, despite their myriad flaws - because, not despite of, Uzohola's need to help, Täj's casual cruelty, Thiago's secretive nature, Demetri's indecisiveness, crippling at times. This whole Selection would have been over in a few days, if it had been Wick handling matters. Some of the girls still clinging in there were utterly unsuitable for Demetri, were utterly unsuitable full stop - and he was standing beside one of them right now.

"You need to drop out of the Selection."

"Excuse you." VT sank her teeth into the cupcake and almost immediately coughed violently as it went down the wrong way. "I know you're my superior but you don't _actually _get to tell me what to do, Wick."

"I'm not telling you anything. I'm asking you."

VT's left eye flittered. It frequently did when she was stressed, or about to say something she knew the listener would not like to hear. Not when she lied - VT relished subterfuge and secrecy. "I'm sorry. I can't."

"If you don't drop out, you'll be eliminated. Thiago will see to it."

Thiago's idea of protecting people was to pull strings behind the scenes and force people towards the path he had decided was best for them. "He can try. Demetri won't..."

"Won't get a say. You know he hasn't done a damn thing in this Selection just yet. Every decision has been taken by Givre and the rest of high command. If Thiago asks..."

"We'll burn that bridge when we get to it." VT shook her head. "I was never that good a spy."

"You evaded Thiago Wesick for years. You were that good."

"Says more about him than I."

The town's orphanage was tucked in between a small butcher's shop and a cobbler's, its windows the only unpainted ones in town - Wick knew from experience that the bright colours were on the inside of the shutters, not the outside. They walked towards it slowly, as though wishing to have their argument tidied up and done with by the time they reached its door. No use bringing this negativity towards the children.

"I want to stay in this Selection." Her voice was soft. "I don't just want to stay, I want to _win_. But..." She shook her head. "If you can convince Demetri to let me away from the competition for a few days, without eliminating me, I'll get to the palace."

"You know they won't allow that. It would be unfair to the others."

"That's not my fault."

"Vardi Tayna. My old friend." Wick leaned against the whitewashed stone of the orphanage, his brown eyes serious. "I know you better than that. If I told you that lives were at risk - truly at risk - the lives of those you care about..."

"Is that what you're telling me, Wick?" Vardi Tayna's eyes were sharper than any Wick had ever known. She reminded him of girls he had known on the streets of Angeles - make-you-bleed eyes, beg-me-to-listen eyes, you'll-regret-this eyes. Wick had rather had enough of those eyes. There were sweeter people in the world with which to spend your time, and yet, every once in a while, you needed someone a little bit sharper.

"That's what I'm telling you."

She stepped back. "Say hi to the kids for me, Wick."

"Where are you going?"

"You asked me to leave the Selection. I'll leave. I've always been a graceful loser, haven't I?"

Wick blinked. "I... I didn't expect you to listen to me."

"I'm not." VT smiled. "Listening to you, I mean. I'm bored to death, and I know I'm not going to win. Poor Demetri doesn't know how to tell me as much. Might as well step out now."

Wick shook his head. "You're up to something."

"Always."

"I'll tell the kids you said hi."

"Give Saran my love."

Wick smirked. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

He waved. VT waved.

He pushed open the door to the orphanage and she disappeared back down the alley, like she had never been there at all.

* * *

The train shuddered its way through the spine of the new Kingdom of Illéa, and as the door to the compartment slid open, Corvina Rouen glanced up from her book to see that Thiago Wesick, spymaster to the King of Ashes, had stepped into the space. He was dressed, as he was usually dressed, in a tailored purple coat, with the seal of the rebellion pinned tightly to his lapel, and he walked as he usually walked, as though he were on utterly solid ground and the train was not swaying back and forth like an epileptic. He wore his hair as he usually wore his hair: a side part that might have looked scholarly if you didn't know who he was, and pushed back out of his face, almost impatiently.

Cor would have known all of these things without looking, and she would have known that they were, indeed, the usual for Thiago Wesick - all without ever having met the man.

Corvina found it difficult to take her dark eyes from him, so intently was she set on carefully analysing his movements as Wesick slid into a seat a few rows away from where Cor and Marjorie were seated at the back of the carriage. He did not so much as offer a stray glance in their direction. He had a file in his hands that he set on the table, but did not open, and appeared to be alone. All of this was noted, and processed, by Corvina in the merest second it took to observe.

He had to know she was there. He had to know where all the Selected girls were, at all times. He would have made it his business to know.

That, again, would be _usual_.

Was he trying to make a point?

She turned back to her book, though it had rather lost its allure, her expression entirely unchanged. Marjorie was scrawling in her notepad, her characteristic looping script almost a manic outpouring of words, so messy that Cor could not have parsed it even if it were in full - and she suspected that the young journalist was likely using a shorthand, so swiftly did she fill up the pages. "Poetry," the other girl had said, quite offhandedly, when she caught Cor's eyes straying in her direction, and Cor had let that lie lie between them without word to contrary.

Underneath the train, the mountains opened up into broad cavernous canyons and crevasses, embroidered with threads of mist and cloud. Beyond, the lights of Sonage glowed dimly from far away, red and gold. Cor had never liked Sonage, though she had lived there long enough - despite the colour and action of the place anyone you passed on the street would sell you out for a single meal.

Cor was fond of lying, of betraying, but not of being lied to, of being betrayed. Most in Sonage knew better than to try their chances with Rouen by now.

Perhaps Wesick had his own business of lies and betrayal in Sonage, and this was all just a nasty coincidence, that they should be riding the same train in the same direction, just a narrow few feet apart. Not so close that she could throttle him, she thought. If she had her gun on her, she might have taken her chances with a potshot, just for the challenge. Her brother-who-was-not-her-brother, Knox, would have loved the idea. She could imagine him quietly egging her on, as though he were seated beside her, opposite Marjorie, legs splayed, hair askew, smiling lazily and saying, "if you have the chance to take the head off a snake, shouldn't you take it?"

Well, to call Wesick a snake might be to give him too much credit. Might imply an excess of skill and success on his part. He'd won a few points, here and there, but whatever he had done, Pandora had achieved thrice over, striking the Crown and the Kingdom in Exile with equal savagery. For every one Wesick or the black widow had killed, Pandora had killed three.

Cor often thought that people living in one realm or the other might have missed that there were, at least to her eyes, three separate worlds co-existing on the continent that had once been wholly Illéa. There was the conventional nation of Illéa, with the bitch queen at its head and her son a puppet on her strings, dancing to a tune that grew more panicked with each passing day - there was the Kingdom of Dust and Ashes, with Demetri, king of the people, and his pack of dogs tearing the country to shreds in his wake - and there was Pandora, the organisation that had flourished in the gaps left between the two, like flowers grow in cracks on the sidewalk, the group to which Cor had pledged so much of her life. A fraternity, Kanon usually called them, and Viridia would correct him swiftly - _a sorority, don't you reckon_?

Cor claimed to be a waitress - and she was, and a poor one at that, prone to spending more time in the back office than front of house, more time shuffling paper and making phone calls than ferrying plates back and forth. The restaurant she worked at was a most transparent front for Pandora's money laundering and a much-treasured source of plausible deniability, built on a foundation of stolen goods and trafficked arms and blood money. And Cor had never questioned it. Never strayed from her path.

She wasn't sure at this stage if she knew how to. She certainly knew she would never want to.

She could only see the back of his head, but Wesick looked as though he had fallen asleep, leaning against the window of the carriage. The file lay, unopened and unread, in front of him. If she was telling the truth, Cor felt a touch insulted by it all.

She would have thought he would want to say_hi _to the girl who had evaded him more than any other in the nation. What kind of a cat and mouse game ended with the cat falling asleep when the mouse was _right there_?

Abruptly she caught sight of Wesick's eyes, open and reflected in the window of the train, and realised that he was looking at her. There wasn't even a challenge in those eyes - just a curiosity.

Cor stood and walked over to him.

Simple as that. Cor could play games when she wanted to, but there was nothing that threw people off more than directness, in many cases. She ignored Marjorie's surprised look, and dismissed their companion, Mikhail, as he said, "Lady Rouen, do you...?" She walked with purpose, with the flawless and decorous mien of a woman destined to be queen, no matter how many she had to hang or quarter to achieve the same.

She sat down opposite Wesick and he said, quite without preamble, "was thinking we never would meet." His gaze was extraordinarily steady, it had to be conceded. He seemed to be almost looking through her.

"That might have been preferable," Cor said softly, venomously.

"You approached me, Rouen." Wesick had reached for the file in front of him and flipped it, but not before Corvina caught sight of the symbol upon it - a golden box, with its lid open, a symbol of chaos rising from its depth. The symbol of Pandora. Had he wanted her to see? Perhaps the file was filled with blank papers, and its presence intended just to send her thoughts into a flurry. "Not vice versa."

Well, his behaviour certainly suggested he knew who she was - or at least, to whom she owed allegiance. She had hoped to remain anonymous a little longer than all that, but she had to allow for changes to the plan when changes were required.

Cor's lips twitched upwards in a tight smile. "You know, you're meant to refer to me as Lady Corvina."

"Lady Corvina." Wesick's expression did not change. "A pleasure."

"Thiago Wesick." Neither did Cor's. "The feeling is mutual."

She extended her hand. With a slight smile, the king's spymaster accepted it, and kissed it, and said, quiet softly, so that it could be heard only by the two of them, "you know, we gutted your men like dogs."

The look in Cor's eyes could have killed, if any ever could.

Because, of course, the truth was and had to be that Corvina was not merely a waitress. She never had been. If she had her way, she never would be.

The finite resemblance between the Crown and Pandora was that most ancient rallying cry -_long live the queen_.

* * *

Liara was very surprised, when she rose the next day, to find the kitchen of Raphael's little town house entirely empty but for the pale man leaning against the counter and having a cup of tea. The hour was late enough that she had thought the place would be abuzz, given how many of them had been crowded into such a tiny space, but everything was quite quiet and peaceful, the only disturbance the persistent tick-tick-ticking of clocks overhead. Raphael's wife was a watchmaker and horologist - it made sense that the place should be so filled with clockwork, but it was such a persistent accompanying heartbeat that Liara could not help but feel that they were counting down to something quite awful and quite unknown.

The dog without a true name was sitting at Täj's side, its head resting his knee, making small sounds in a vain attempt to get his attention. Liara had to avert her eyes when she realised that the pale man was not entirely dressed - his shirt was open, and he was barefoot, like he had rolled out of bed and gone in urgent search of caffeine before even arranging himself to seem presentable. It would have been utterly unthinkable in Angeles, Liara, for anyone to even consider attiring themselves in such a manner where they might be seen. She had certainly never seen Mordred dress like this. It was so casual.

He was very casual as well. He looked irritated to have Liara join him, but said nothing and only moved away quite agreeably as Liara crossed the kitchen in search of a bowl. He did not take a seat but gravitated towards the nearest counter, where he was joined after just a second by the nameless dog, and then moved with a slight smile again as Liara, hands raised apologetically, had to displace him in search of a spoon. "I feel chased," Täj said darkly, and this first few words from him helped put Liara enormously more at ease. So he did speak. And he didn't seem all that unfriendly.

"Well, I do rather feel lied to."

Täj's smile showed his cuspids. It was a strange, suddenly transformative expression from an otherwise humourless man. "Do you? That is unfortunate."

"The dog." Liara took a seat at the tiny table and traced her fingers around the patterns that had been carved there by years of use. Everything in this house seemed so alive, and vibrant, and lived-in. Not like the palace, where all was cold and sterile and perfect always, and you could never breathe, or relax your spine. The tablecloth was threadbare, unravelling at its patched edges, and left the corners of the table bare; the bowl had been shattered and put back together with cheap gold paint tracing the seams where it had been repaired, in a pale imitation of kintsukuroi. Even the cup Täj was holding was stained brown and yellow by many years of making tea. "You told me his name was Vovve."

Täj's brow creased. "I assure you that it is."

Liara smiled. "Well, Raphael calls him Cuckoo. And Agares called him Juk. And his collar says Feste. And Vardi Tayna calls him a her and calls her Bruce."

"I don't," Täj said softly. "See your point." He had folded his arms. Liara found it a little difficult to figure out where to put her gaze, and fixed it on his unfolded collar. His shirt was unironed, a pale green colour that matched his eyes. He had a scar on his collarbone, twisted and ugly and edged in a deep black that made it look as though it were rather festering. He had white bandages around the fingers of his left hand, like a splint. "Do you have a point?"

Liara had to hold back a laugh. It was like something Mordred would have said. If Demetri was acting decidedly unlike himself, then she was glad to find some small amount of familiarity in this strange place. "Everyone keeps telling me a different name for him."

"Things can have lots of different names." Täj reached down to ruffle the nameless dog's ears. Whatever its name was, it looked delighted to have this attention lavished on it, and stared adoringly up at him. "He'll answer to anything."

"So I can give him a name?" Liara turned to the food that Raphael had laid out on the table for the girls - it was something of a paltry offering, and certainly nothing compared to the immense barbecues that the rebels had put out for the girls earlier in the Selection, but she appreciated that people like Rafa and Agares probably didn't have much to offer, and was grateful for their thoughtfulness. There was, as Raphael had said, newly baked bread, and home-made butter, and little bowls of cream and jam that seemed fresh, and little plates of home-cured ham and Sultanate cheeses laid out on a little wooden board.

"I think that's something you have to earn."

"Well," Liara said. She picked up a piece of cheese and flicked it to the dog, and was delighted to see him rear up and snatch it from the air with a look of thinly masked delight in his dark eyes. "I'll work on it."

Täj made a sound of assent and went to put the kettle on again.

There was a photo frame on one of the bookshelves, set between what might have been a Bible and a tattered copy of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, with two pictures within it: the first, what must have been Raphael, and what must have been Raphael's family, a set of tall, beautiful blonde women in rebel khaki, with a single small, blonde boy standing, a little to the side, looking rather bemused at it all. The little boy, who must have been Raphael's brother, appeared in the second photo as well, where he had his arms around a small, glowering Asian girl and Demetri - Demetri as Liara had known him, all pale blonde hair and childishness seriousness, looking a tad worse for the wear in borrowed clothes too large for him, with shadows under his eyes. Demetri, after he had been taken.

Liara tried to keep her voice light. "What does Demetri call him? The dog?"

Täj relaxed back against the sink and shrugged. "King gets the collar. His Majesty calls him Feste, when he calls him."

Liara thought. "Like Shakespeare? Like the fool?"

"He's not a clever dog."

"Raphael let the king name her dog?"

Täj cocked his head. "Wouldn't you, Liara?"

Liara had to hide her laugh a second time. Well, she had - not her dog, but the kitten she had adopted after the palace's stable cat had produced a litter quite unexpectedly and the staff and scrambled to find homes for them all. Trajan had made a rare appearance in the stables, which was traditionally Ysabel's domain, and had busied himself handing out little mewling creatures to the court's children, who had all crowded down to see. "Mordred, a little black one like your little black heart... Cecilie, this white one rather looks a diva, can you handle her? Orpheus, here, this tabby, and Liara..." Trajan had put his hands together and handed Liara the tiny black-and-white kitten like he was spilling gold into her hands. "Be very careful, my dear, she's the runt of the litter. I wouldn't trust anyone else with her."

Liara's father hadn't approved, and had threatened to drown it in a bag in the river, until the laconic Set, on a rare social call, had pointed out that killing a gift given by the king himself was never a fantastic look for a general who protested his loyalty given any opportunity, and that Trajan might have words if anything were to happen to the kitten. "He wants it to be named Nerva," Set had added, standing on the threshold, right before he left the Lee household. "The kitten, I mean. Something to do with a Roman emperor... Liara, that suits you alright, I hope?" Set and Trajan were alike in many ways, and one of their similarities that Liara had always treasured was the way that they spoke to her like a full-fledged adult.

So Liara had called her cat Nerva, because the king had said it was so.

She supposed that meant that she had to call this dog Feste, for the sake of symmetry.

"You make a fair point, Mr...?" She searched for his name, and realised abruptly that it had either never been given to her or he did not have one.

Täj frowned. "Täj."

Liara said, "is that your first or your last name?"

He shrugged. "Most recent," he said simply, and Liara decided to let that lie and turned to her breakfast quite quietly while the water boiled and the clocks around them kept ticking like a deathwatch.

* * *

Sol really had not been sure what to expect from her hastily arranged date with the king, and was rather dismayed to find that silence reigned for those first few long moments in the car as they left the old army barracks and sped towards the city on the hill. It felt like so long since Sol had left the bright lights of Honduragua behind, that she had been rather taken aback to learn that it was a city, and not some cluster of rebels and trucks with their headlights on - as had been the only oasis of illumination in the Wastelands, habitually. Sol could not say she was sorry to leave the desert behind. It had not suited her, and she had found herself rather lonely throughout, too refined for the rebels and too common for those who came from court. Too southern for the northern girls and too northern for the southerners.

A perpetual paradox.

"I am sorry to be so quiet," Demetri said abruptly, his voice rueful. He had changed his shirt at some point since the mad rush to escape the last safehouse; Sol rather thought this was the most casual she had ever seen him, with his sleeves rolled to his elbows, baring sinewy arms and a slowly fading tan borne of the Wasteland's sun. It was an odd green tartan colour, what looked soft cotton, worn at the elbows and wrists. He wouldn't have looked out of place in Honduragua, Sol thought, in one of the cafes frequented by students and young professionals, with a laptop and a coffee. Demetri wouldn't look out of place anywhere. She had never spoken to him before, but she was able to see _that _clearly enough.

She had never spoken to him before, and yet, in the long idle hours at the last safehouse, she had allowed herself to wonder what he might be like. Whether he would be like he appeared on the Report. If that was all script, and he would turn out to be a brute, or a liar like Emilio, or some other form of odious and distasteful. Maybe he would be perfectly lovely and polite and chivalrous but just not Sol's type at all - that seemed like the worst option of all, truth be told, because if that were to happen then Sol wasn't sure what she would do. Of course she wouldn't marry someone she couldn't stand, she had enough dignity for that, but someone she didn't love, someone who was nonetheless kind and thoughtful and sweet, well, that wasn't a matter of dignity but of honesty, and Sol was such a fervent believer in honesty that she didn't want to test her own loyalty to the concept, lest she be found lacking - and an enormous hypocrite as well.

"That's alright," Sol said. "I tend to be quiet too."

"Nothing more boring," Demetri said thoughtfully. "Than two boring people stuck in a car together - nothing more comfortable either."

That aligned quite closely with Sol's experience as well, and she agreed with a smile as the capital city of Paloma abruptly enveloped them - the suburbs had been eroded and scoured entirely away by the war that Demetri's people had waged to win it, so when you reached the city it was, quite truly, the city in true urban splendour, all broad green avenues and tall apartment buildings in steel and concrete and old fashioned cars on the street that ought to have been relegated to the annals of history long ago in candyfloss colors of pink and orange and lime green. Men in suits and women in heels. It was like she was back in Honduragua all over again.

They pulled up outside a glossy blue-panelled building, its windows elegantly arranged in a perfect pyramid of books, glossy magazines out in a wide fan. The letter were laid out, big and broad and bright, above the door. "Uzo mentioned you had to leave your books behind in the rush to leave," Demetri said, by way of explanation as he slid out of the car. Sol similarly stepped out, having somehow failed to notice that Demetri was coming around to open her door for her, and there was a slightly awkward laugh that became much more genuine quicker than Sol would have thought possible. Demetri offered her his arm, and she took it gladly as they went into the library. He waved off the staff as they approached and said, very softly, in a tone that suggested he had been ejected from libraries in the past and knew the wrath of the librarians, "please don't worry. We're quite alright, we know our way around." He glanced at Sol. "You're a lawyer, right? You know your Bliss from your Dewey Decimal?"

"I think I can manage," Sol said with a smile, and Demetri led them into the stacks. High, towering piles of glossy books - these were not the relics of a town that had been, but newly printed tomes. The Kingdom in Exile clearly had presses for this sort of thing, but their choices of publication seemed eclectic at best - here was the Sultan's collection of quotations, and here was a book of Saharan poetry, and over there was a whole collection of scientific proofs. Despite Demetri's jokes, there didn't seem to be any classification system. Sol slid an engineering manual out from between two copies of poetry, and shook her head in mild horror as Demetri went wandering down the aisle to pull books, seemingly at random, from seemingly random shelves, at seemingly random intervals, making it look entirely arbitrary. She caught sight of only one title - some translated Chinese novel - and the cover of another - photography, she thought, something about tribes in the Sahara.

They were not the only patrons. That surprised Sol a little, but every so often she saw readers pass like ghosts between shelves - a rebel on a day off, perhaps, her arm in a sling; a student with big glasses and messy hair; an older, maybe retired gentleman reading up about botany. They seemed to take absolutely no heed of their king and the girl from the Selection, only exchanged polite nods when gazes met and then moved on again quite peaceably.

"So," Sol said, after there had been another long silence, and Demetri laughed.

"I am so sorry," he said again, and shook his head. "I've been up all night. I'm not sure I have the _energy _to talk."

"We could have postponed."

"No, no, that wouldn't have been fair."

He should have chosen his words more careful, Sol thought, for there was no matter on which she had more keenly whetted opinions than that of justice and honesty and fairness. Sol had spent enough time around the rebels by now to know that Demetri's ideas of protocol did not seem quite so strict as those of the Angeles court, so she felt within her rights to soften her words with only a title and no true appeal to enormous deference. "And you think this is, your Majesty?"

Demetri clearly had a habit of rolling his tongue across his teeth when he was thinking, or taken aback. "What do you mean?"

"I just think..." Sol plucked a book from the shelf and flicked through it with a violence, as though by redirecting her gaze she could detach herself further from the words she was about to utter. "You've met a handful of us, and you've eliminated so many others, and then you have dates with us one after another, Nina and then me and then probably someone else this evening, like clockwork, like we're a chore."

"I meant what I said on the Report. Now that I've narrowed the Selected down to those that I can..." Demetri shook his head and traced a thumb over the cover of the book he was holding. "Those that I can _stand_, I suppose." He met Sol's gaze, quite deliberately. "I want to spend time with you."

"Well," Sol said stubbornly. "I still don't think it's fair to do it like this."

"And fairness matters to you?"

"It should matter to _everyone_."

She had forgotten herself, and Demetri could clearly see that realisation in her eyes as she blinked and shut her mouth, very abruptly, but he smiled and held a hand out for the book she had chosen with one eyebrow lifted. "You are absolutely right, Lady Soledad. It should. It is good I have people like you to keep me in check when I am risk of being... unfair."

"I don't mean to speak out of turn..."

"I don't recognise turns in conversation, Lady Soledad - if I did, I never would get a word in edgewise. Allow me to buy you that book, as an apology."

"This is a _library_," Sol said. "You don't _buy_books at a library..." She paused. "Unless you're French."

"Or," Demetri said with a smile. "The king. So, it's to be Hemingway?"

* * *

Devery Atiqtalaaq was not a classically beautiful woman, but what Saran thought might be called handsome, with a broad, flat face and very bright brown eyes, her long dark hair worn in two braids. She reminded Saran a little of her grandfather, Bataar, but it was a superficial resemblance; she smiled too easily for any comparison to Saran's övöö to ring true. She was sitting on one of the low wooden benches that lined the long tables at which the children were fed their breakfasts and lunches every day. She was still wearing clothes with a slightly northern flair - her jacket hooded, her sleeves too long to truly belong to the south, a silk scarf folded on the table in front of her.

"Miss Altai." Devery stood, and smiled. "A pleasure to meet you." To Saran's surprise, Devery did not reach to shake her hand, but held out her arms to grasp Saran by the elbow, as elders might have greeted her if she was still on the steppes, at home. The _z__olgolt,_her mother had always called it, the traditional greeting. Somehow it was more soothing than a handshake, almost as familiar and comfortable as a hug with a family member."_Amar mend üü_, Lady? Were you safe and happy?" The two northern women leaned in to touch their cheeks to one another - Devery smelled like the north, Saran thought distantly, of the Yukon river and cotton grass and green tea.

"_Tiim shüü_, Warden, I have been safe and happy." They stepped back from one another and Devery gestured that they should sit together, so Saran slipped onto the bench on the other side of the table. The dining hall of the orphanage was small and cramped, but made larger by the clever installation of mirrors on either wall, which made the space seem to triple in size if you didn't look too closely. High windows set into the top of the wall allowed light to pour in, seemingly from every side, illuminating the tiny dust motes stirring in the air and causing a bouncing shine to glare from the mirrors. Devery slid back onto the bench and, without preamble, began to pour the tea that had been set out for them and pushed a plate of sugar bread towards Saran.

"You are looking slender, Lady Altai. Wickaninnish Harjo was good enough to get us some fresh pastries for our meeting - he recommended you try the _besos_."

"Mr Harjo is here?"

"He was. He always comes to visit the children when he comes to this town. He built this orphanage after we took the province, and considers it his patronage." Devery took a deep sip of her tea. "You know, the Kingdom faced a serious problem some years ago. Too many children were being named after him, in gratitude. The whole class was Demetri this and Wick that - so many that teachers had to number them."

"He must have made quite the impact."

"You've met him. I imagine you've noticed the effect he can have."

If Devery noticed Saran blush, she was polite enough to say nothing. "May I ask, Warden, what brings you so further south?"

"I have come to see you, Saran, and the other northern girls. To ensure you are being cared for, and are happy here."

"I am, Warden, thank you."

"And to offer you my sincere encouragement and congratulations. You know, everyone in Yukon couldn't be prouder of you. To see you on the Report, and field every obstacle."

"I haven't done much, Warden. It's nothing." She hadn't even got a date with Demetri, or indeed met him in any truth - and now that the girls had been scattered into so many different and diverse locales, she knew that his time would be more limited and exclusive than ever.

"Please, call me Devery. And, Saran - you've lasted. That's not nothing." Devery slid a teacup across the table, as though encouraging Saran to drink. "You girls from our northern provinces are at such a disadvantage, and you are doing so well regardless, down here in the south. You, and Yue Yukimura, should be proud of yourselves."

"And Ekaitza?"

Devery was silent as she looked down at the mug in her hands and shook her head. Her braids twitched with the abrupt motion. "I am sorry. Miss Jones will not be continuing in the Selection. I learned this news only yesterday."

Ekaitza had been eliminated? That wasn't such a surprise - she was a creature of such subtle savagery, there had been times Saran wasn't sure why she was even in the Selection. But how could Demetri have known that, without speaking to her? Ekaitza had her good qualities, her amusing tendencies, her fascination with bizarrely cynical conspiracy theories and her tendency to cut through conversations with a blunt brutality. Would she be going back north? To Baffins? Saran said, "I'm very sorry to hear that. She was a good friend to me."

"She seems a brave young woman. Her calling is to serve the Kingdom in other ways - but not as queen." Devery Atiqtalaaq had a way of speaking that made it seem like she was letting you in on a secret, like you were being treated to knowledge that precious few would be permitted to access. "If I may, Saran - I believe your calling does not so diverge." She stirred her teacup with a long silver spoon and encouraged Saran to eat with a gesture and a smile. "You know, I have borne witness to... very few Selections. Trajan's. And Demetri's. But it was clear to me, on the outside, that this is not a competition for a heart but for a crown. And with a crown comes a people. A people who must be protected."

Saran could not help but think of long-ago days of youth, playing in the garden with Qadan and Naran, pretending to be khans and climbing bodily onto whatever little pony strayed close enough to them to play folk hero and charge back and forth across the hilly plateau on which their house was set, practising their archery with the clumsiness of children. To be a khan had merely been to tell her older brother what to do, and wrap yourself in fur, and stand on the highest branch of the tree. A much simpler matter than what Devery seemed to be speaking about now. "I'm not sure..."

"I do not wish to put any sort of responsibility on you, Saran. You must trace your own path. But at night, I pray that our queen shall be of the north."

"I'm not of the north," Saran said, almost automatically. And she wasn't, not really. She had put down no roots in Yukon, had left no bones in its soil. She still belonged over the sea, under the same sky, yes, but on different earth, on the Altai mountains, with her family.

"But you know it. I have faith that, if you become queen, I will not have to beseech you to think of Yukon, and Whites, and Baffins, and Hansport, as I know I will have to plead with any queen from the south." She was speaking like she thought Saran had a chance. Saran had not expected conversations like this to take place until the Elite had been chosen, until the field had been narrowed, until Demetri had spent enough time to make it seem like any girl could have a better chance than the others. Did Devery know something that Saran didn't, or was she merely hedging her bets?

"I would like to think," Saran said slowly, choosing her words very carefully. "That I would treat all of the provinces with the dignity and respect that they deserve."

"Then you are a rare type indeed, Lady." Devery reached across the table to pluck one of the powdered pastries from the plate and inspect it carefully. "Wickaninnish always has the most wonderful taste."

Saran wasn't entirely sure she was speaking about the pastry.

"Please, do let me know if I can help you in any way."Devery looked at Saran. "I cannot interfere directly with the Selection, but if I can assist you otherwise, I shall, to the best of my ability."

"Thank you, Devery. That means a lot to me."

She waved this away. "It is my pleasure, I assure you. I had the pleasure of watching the last Report with your charming sister and your wonderful grandfather, and they both asked that I tell you they are both so proud of you, and wish you the best of luck." Devery smiled. "Yul misses you as well."

"I miss Yul!" Saran laughed. "It was such a disappointment to learn you couldn't bring pets to the Selection."

"Reform may be needed," Devery conceded. "There are some rules more outdated than the others." She patted Saran's hand. She had many rings glittering on her hand; the seal of the rebellion shone brightly from her first finger. "I'll be in touch. Please, enjoy your stay - this is a lovely town, and I am sure Wickaninnish will be taking excellent care of you."

"I'm sure." Saran hesitated. "And, if I may ask, Warden..."

"Devery."

"Devery. Do you know when I will see the king again?"

Devery looked thoughtful. "I am afraid I do not. But I am sure it will not be too long."

Saran nodded. "Thank you for speaking to me."

Devery smiled. "Thank you for listening."

* * *

"Opal."

She turned her face away, and stared out the window. And it _was _a stare, of that there was absolutely no mistaking. There was no anger in her expression - she wasn't sure she could muster any at this point - it was just a deep and profound tiredness that seemed to have set into the marrow of her very bones. "Don't," Her voice was one of exhaustion; her entire body seemed weary. "Theo, just..." She didn't seem to have anger, and she didn't seem to have words. "Don't. Please, don't."

She had almost forgotten just how blue his eyes were, or how soft they could become when they were looking at her. How lean and strong his arms. How infectious his smile.

But, of course, he wasn't smiling now.

"You have to let me explain." They had travelled in silence, the whole long journey, because Opal had got into the backseat while Theo and Mouchard had got into the front and Opal had pretended to sleep the whole way to the military barracks, silent and fuming and eyes-shining under the coat she put over her face to shield her features from the rebels in the front seat, lest she betray herself in the safety of the car's shadow. Mouchard had slipped out when they reached the military compound, and Theo had driven them to the barracks, and cut the engine, and now they sat together, quite frozen, unable to speak freely but unwilling, at least for now, to leave without saying something.

"I don't _have _to do anything." Opal's voice was a tightly wound coil. This was such a familiar scenario - not the anger, not the tension, but the physical geography of it all, like he was dropping her home from a late night at the laundromat, like she was propping up her knees and relaxing with her coursework on her knees on the long drive home, and Theo was regaling her with tales of his day at the garage and whatever it was the wrench-boys had got up to that day, be it a creative prank or a highly cantankerous customer or some outrageous instruction from the boss that had just made life more difficult. He had always managed to do so without complaining - Theo had always been the light to Opal's shadow, the bright spark to her eighteen-going-on-eighty attitude to all things in life. When she had, on occasion, glimpsed him about the place at the last safehouse, she had perceived that he had retained that quality. The rebels had not stripped it from him yet. "I don't have to. And I won't."

He was silent for such a long moment, she thought she might have finally left him at a loss for words. She wrenched the door open - he said, "Opal, you can't" and she said, "I assure you, I can" - and she slammed it shut behind her, unable to entirely hold back her frustration and bitterness and fury at the whole damned awful situation. She marched up the steps into the military barracks, where Liz was waiting for her, to see that she was okay, and ask her if she was comfortable telling her what was wrong, and whether there was someone whose ass needed to be kicked. Even as Opal smiled and shook her head and said no, thank you for your concern but no, everything was fine, thank you, Liz, you're a good friend, Liz, please don't worry but thank you for checking in, there was a small, powerful part of her that told her to go back, go back to the car, take him in your arms, tell him to explain, tell him to explain it all, and accept the explanation, whatever it may be.

But she didn't. He had left her - that had been his choice. Being in the Selection now, living with the rebels, seeing their passion, she thought that she could understand it a little. But he had made his choice. He couldn't begrudge her making her own.

Young love, she thought bitterly. First love. What a poison arrow it was.

* * *

There was a tap on the door and Atiena looked up to see Täj leaning on the door frame with his arms folded, looking more well-rested than she had ever seen him - almost healthy, she thought, but still just a little gaunt, just a little hungry, to seem fully human rather than something feral with a more civilised skin stretched over his frame. He reminded her so strongly of her family sometimes, she had to bite back the name Lethal as it immediately rose to her tongue. Instead, she straightened up from where she'd been doing sit-ups and said, quite dryly, "is there any point in knocking when the door's open?"

He shrugged. "Politeness?" He stepped over the threshold and glanced around at the cozy space that Raphael had accorded them - they were sharing their rooms, two to the space. Atiena's half of the room was sparse and bare and quite practical compared to the aesthetic remodelling Liara had begun on her side; there was a narrow channel between their two beds, just wide enough for one person to walk through. Atiena thought it was only a matter of time before they ended up at one another's throats, even if they got along famously; she highly doubted the general's daughter was accustomed to sharing a room with an Eight.

"Well," she said, jumping to her feet and dusting off her trousers. "It was, I must say, very polite."

"I do try." He had been trailed into the room by Raphael's dog, Juk, who seemed reluctant to ever leave him. "Thiago sent me to collect a letter?"

"He promised me he would." Atiena could not hold back the suspicion in her voice. "And you'll deliver it to my family?"

"If you tell me where to find them."

"I'll tell you where you can leave it, so that they'll find it."

"Paranoid, are we?" He said it like it was nothing, like it wouldn't be a total betrayal of the entire family to tell the rebellion where they were - especially when, as the air strike had demonstrated, the rebellion was not so leak-proof as they might like to pretend. Atiena might be able to trust Täj, but could she trust the rest of the inner circle? Every member of the rebellion which helped him get from her to Tammins? Every rebel which might be told where he had gone, or why he had gone there?

"Paranoid." Atiena's mouth twitched. "Glass houses?"

"Didn't say you were wrong to be." Täj glanced out the window and made the slightest of faces, a mere curl of the lip and depression of the brow, and somehow managed to communicate a wealth of cynicism as he did so. "All the wisest men were."

"Well," Atiena said. "It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you, right?"

She turned and pulled the letter from its place of pride on her desk - she had slaved over it, writing and rewriting it all, and burning every draft that had come before, never including too many details and yet, trying, at each juncture, to communicate as much as she could to the people that she cared about so much and was stranded so far from.

"Do you think we're out to get you, Lady Atiena?"

She smiled. "I'm not taking chances."

He took it from her and, as she had hoped he would, treated it as though it were a very rare treasure indeed. "Clever girl."

* * *

Eden could not be absolutely sure which rebel had done it, but she woke on her first day in her new safe-house to find a copy of the _Axiom_pinned to the door of her bedroom. It was not an old copy - its front page bore yesterday's date. An evening edition. And there was, written in a deep black marker above its headline, just beside the little picture of its chief editor, three words in bold, scrawled letters:

**COLABORACIONISTAS **

**SERÁN **

**AHORCADOS**

Eden spoke a number of languages, but she thought she wouldn't have needed any Spanish at all to understand what this anonymous message was trying to communicate. _Collaborators will be hanged. _

Something tightened in her chest, just under her ribs, like a long thread of thorns curling around her heart and squeezing tight, threatening to drive all of the breath from her lungs. She forced herself to, as she always did, count very slowly in Italian to calm herself down, to slow the rush of blood in her veins and the pounding in her head.

_Uno, due, tre._

She did not slam the door shut or make any sort of fuss, but pulled the newspaper from the wood, quite controlledly, and shut the door firmly. Vivian Lahela's daughter would not allow anyone who might be watching see how this act had affected her. Her movements were sure, and very steady, as she flicked the lock shut and pressed her forehead against the cool wood for one long moment, forcing the air in and out of her lungs. It was almost a violent act. Her hands curled tightly around the newspaper, and she had the sudden urge to tear it into shreds, rend it into pieces and fling every scrap out of the window. Let it flutter like snow onto the yard below.

_Quattro, cinque, sei._

Eden turned. She walked. She sat on the edge of her bed, and smoothed out the pages of the newspaper, the ink smearing as her palm passed across it, obscuring her mother's face as surely as if she had scratched it out herself. The headline was a trite one, some company relocating from Swendway to Angeles to take advantage of new lax commercial tax laws that were greatly strengthening the province's economy and providing thousands of new jobs. Eden supposed most of it was probably true - the bulk of it. The Axiom had not earned its reputation by spreading falsehoods. Instead, it used the truth like a cudgel, distorted and twisted but so accurate in the main that it was difficult for their opponents to stage a strong critique. The first page was inoffensive - she recognised the hand of her mother in some of the more fawning pieces, and could almost picture her at her office in the Angeles headquarters, blue pen in hand - she always said that using too much red looked gauche - slashing out words and jotting in more emotive substitutes, carving out the image of a happy, productive nation engaged in a most holy war with a band of savages on their southern border. There was, on the second page, a picture of Demetri, and a condemnation of some bomb that had been placed on the St George border. That piece had been penned by Brooks. She could tell - he had a remarkably clear, crisp style of reporting that often contrasted with the way other journalists tripped over themselves to seem intellectual and win a word of praise from Vivian.

Eden could have told them it was an utterly pointless pursuit.

_Sette, otto._

There was no mention of Eden. She almost tore the pages, so violently did she turn them, rip them apart and scan for her own name. No mention of the Selection at all. No mention of the air strike. Because it had been a failure? Because they had not killed any of the Selected girls?

Or because they had _tried _to?

Eden may have turned to the rebellion, but she was still Vivian Lahela's daughter. Collaborators must hang. She had been raised in Fennley, educated in Angeles. Collaborators must hang. She had been entangled in romantic relationship with the children of the Crown's courtiers and the celebrities that Illéan citizens worshipped. Collaborators must hang. She was not a rebel. She was still Illéan. And not even the _Axiom _would be able to spin a failed attempt to murder a group of young, beautiful women from their very heartland.

To that effect, there was an interview on page six with Fatimah. Eden's oldest friend had joined the army straight after high school, and had surprised all of Illéan high society by crossing no-man's-land into the rebellion encampment almost immediately after arriving on the warfront. She had returned to Fennley after a year, missing a leg and an eye and her innocence, and had been made an utter pariah for it. Yet, clearly Vivian had talked her into doing one of the Axiom's characteristic character assassinations, for here was Fatimah, the photo subtly altered to emphasise the grotesqueness of her missing eye, giving a thorough interview to let them know just how awful life as a rebel had been. She saw the words _wanton_ _massacre _and the word _cannibalised _and had to turn the page and move on very quickly indeed, lest she allow her composure to slip.

_Nove, dieci, undi._

More people to protect, when Angeles fell.

What was Fatimah _thinking_? Eden was in the lion's den now,trying to pluck out thorns, trying to win enough influence that her collaborationist families and friends might be spared the consequences of the vile lies that they spread in the name of the Crown, once Demetri's people began the purge that always followed the vanquishing, once bodies started dropping.

Collaborators will be hanged.

They couldn't, they wouldn't, hang their queen.

Or their queen's family, no matter how awful and manipulative and loveless they could be. They wouldn't dare.

My family. This will protect my family. The words that she had whispered to herself when she had first posted the application to the Selection came to her anew. My family. This will protect my family.

She almost had to smile as she shut the newspaper again and folded it along its crease and laid it neatly in her lap, her mother's eyes staring up at her. Under any other circumstances, she thought she might have finally impressed her mother. In contention for the hand of a king? She would have had a stroke if this was Mordred's Selection. Hell, she would have sent in the application form herself. There had been many a day Eden had picked up the phone to her mother, and heard her mention those dread words, _we need to stabilize our image _(translation: new fake relationship for publicity incoming). She had forever dreaded the day that Mordred's name might follow.

Well, she thought dryly, staring down at the newspaper. Collaborators will be hanged. She had a whole new set of worries now.

_Dodici, tredici._

Thirteen. Thirteen girls left. Twelve girls to beat to the crown, and to the protection the crown would afford.

Eden was Vivian Lahela's daughter. When she wanted something, she tended to get it.

* * *

Raphael had brought them to the market just before noon, and Yue had lost herself for several long, happy moments in the maze of sights and sounds - the entire space was crowded with people, their stalls, their piles of rainbow-coloured fruits and vegetables, their little wooden boxes upon which they displayed yellowed envelopes containing written fortunes, their scented candles and intricately carved silver jewellery laid out like nooses, their little music boxes, some pastel and pale like little cakes and others crafted of a rich wood, fretted with gold and bronze around the edges. Lilting voices called out across the streets, in languages familiar and not-so. Agares had been there to set up a stall and sell some of her gorgeously crafted golden watches; Raphael was moving from merchant to merchant, chatting in that casual, charismatic way that she had, and Yue had been allowed to move around at her own pace. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she needed adhere to no schedule, needed to maintain her composure to impress no one. Raphael had slipped her a few coins, to spend on whatever caught her eye, but Yue had found that she had not spotted anything that justified the purchase and was perfectly content just to wander and look and listen.

At some point, her new roommate had appeared beside her at a stall that sold intricately woven baskets. The stall holder said something to Vardi Tayna in a language Yue did not understand, and the two began to haggle with an intensity that seemed entirely undeserved given they were arguing over a woven drinks coaster. As far as Yue could tell, Vardi Tayna came away the victor - in any case, she came away with the coaster and almost immediately handed it to Yue. "That's for you."

Yue was utterly bemused. "Um." She turned the coaster over in her hands. "Uh, thank you?"

"You're very welcome, Yukimura. Where's Rafa?"

"Um..." Yue pointed, and Vardi Tayna nodded, clapped her quite hard on the back, and disappeared between two stalls in the general direction Yue had indicated. Yue watched her go - she would never understand that girl - and could not help but tug the coaster into her pocket - it was a gift, even if it was from someone as abrasive as Vardi Tayna - and decided to head back towards Raphael's house to see if she could pull together a bit of lunch before Raphael and Agares came back. As far as she could tell, they weren't being compensated for opening their home to the danger of sheltering the Selected, so helping out with housework was the least that Yue could do to try and help out. And, as much as she didn't want to admit it, she was a little lonely without Saran and Ekaitza and Cor. She hadn't realised how accustomed she had grown to having them around, or how boring some parts of her day had become without the other girls to talk to.

To her surprise, when she got back to Raphael's house, there were two books waiting for her on her bed - at first, she thought that Vardi Tayna might have thrown some of her belongings onto Yue's side of the room, as heedless of personal boundaries as she was of all things, but there was a little note inscribed on the cover page of the first book, a shiny copy of the translated _Dream of the Red Chamber_, so new that its spine was still utterly rigid:

_My dearest, Yue - _

_Hopefully one you haven't got around to reading this one yet - a personal favourite. _

_Let me know what you think of it?_

_With affection, Demetri_

She traced her finger over the words my dearest, and could not hold back the smile that came to her lips as she gazed at the note. The second book was, as promised, a collection of Nizar Qabbani's poetry. This one was well-worn and well-loved, dog-eared and soft-spined, clearly cared for and yet thoroughly read to the point of utter disintegration. The name _Gabriel _was etched onto the first page; it must have already been second-hand when Demetri picked it up, and yet that did not make Yue love it any less.

"My dearest," she said softly to herself, "my dearest," and then had to shake her head at exactly how stupid she was being. One more time."_My dearest_!"

Well, she decided, that was that. She was going to have to find a book to return to him. If she wasn't going to get a date - and it was starting to look like she wouldn't - then at least she might be able to slip him back a note, to say some small words of gratitude for the thoughtful gifts.

She wondered if Raphael had given her enough coins to buy a book from the market.

Well, she thought wryly, there was only one way to find out.

But first, she was going to have to grab Vardi Tayna - and what a terrifying idea that seemed. But Yue squared her shoulders. Cor wouldn't be intimidated by her, and nor would Saran. Ekaitza probably already would have fought her to establish dominance. Yue was going to be sharing a room with the rebel girl (and a bathroom as well, an idea which terrified Yue even more than the bedroom situation), so she had to get over herself, the sooner the better. Not only did Vardi Tayna clearly have a skill - and a passion - for haggling with stall holders, she also seemed to be quite close to Demetri. She would know what kind of a book he would like. She would know how to make him happy.

Just as he had made Yue happy.


	13. In Fading Blue

**Chapter 12: In Fading Blue**

* * *

_I've been back home watching from far away. I wonder where you are._  
_Did you look back as you crossed the moon? Do you wonder if I wonder 'bout you?_

\- Paul Johnson

* * *

Ekaitza could only truly relax once their convoy had crossed the border into the northern enclave of the Kingdom and the rebels around her had relaxed their grips on their weapons. They crossed by foot through the woods - they had been dropped off by one bus in Illéa, feigning deafness when they were stopped by border guards while Mouchard had given some spiel about a school for disabled adults, and they were picked up by another bus in the Kingdom, Devery Atiqtalaaq on board with a smile on her face and armfuls of fabric. "Good afternoon, Miss Jones!" No longer a lady - Ekaitza couldn't say that it was an unwelcome change, though she privately thought she would have much rather just been called Ekaiza. "Lovely to see you - I hope your journey was not unpleasant?"

Ekaitza's gaze had something of a glower to it as she looked up at the Northern Warden; her hair was wildly astrew, her face dirtied by their hike, her clothes dishevelled. "I've had worse." Ekaitza had found the escape rather relaxing, if she told the truth - it was the kind of wilderness she was used to, all plants and birds and tiny animals scampering in the undergrowth. Not like the radioactive sterility of the Wastelands, where you might spot one bird in the day if you were fortunate, where you only ever heard the wolves over the horizon and spotted lone coyotes scampering here and there. She stepped back to let her rebel companions board first - they had travelled further than she had - and then climbed onto the bus, indicating the garments in Warden Atiqtalaaq's arms as she did so. "I hope those aren't for me."

"Sorry to disappoint. There's going to be a reception for you in Yukon before we continue on to Baffins - you weren't quite an Elite, but it's looking like you might be the last northerner eliminated before the Elite, so let's make an impression." Atiqtalaaq threw a few pieces of cloth at Ekaitza. "I hope I hit the right notes - you can change down the back, I'll make sure the lads keep their eyes facing forward."

Ekaitza shrugged. It didn't bother her much if they didn't. Nonetheless, she slipped down the aisle as Atiqtalaaq began to run through the next stage of their travel - first they would attend a reception in Yukon, smile for the cameras, film a few short bits and a post-elimination interview for the Report. Then, on to Whites to sign for her new land, accept her Selection money, run through protocol for the next few months - she would have to return to the Court in Exile for Demetri's wedding and coronation, but until then, it seemed her time would be rather free. Nor did she seem obliged to enter into the service of the rebellion, as she had theorised at dinner with Cor and Saran one night. She seemed to be - quite truly - free to live her life.

Well. Once they got through the next few hours.

She hoped that once they got eliminated, Saran and Yue might pay her a visit in the very far north, or at least send a letter her way. She had only known them for a few weeks, but Ekaitza Jones was not a girl in the habit of making friends, and thought it wisest not to let the few she had slip away because of circumstance - and anyway, who was to say Ekaitza would have to go back up to Baffins? Land was land. Maybe she and her grandfather could make their life somewhere kinder.

Atiqtalaaq had chosen her clothes well - a soft pair of black leather trousers, like the kind Ekaitza might have worn hunting, only nice and new and pliable. A tight grey sweater that managed to cling and keep her relatively warm, with a funnel neck and sleeves slightly too long for her arms, so that she could fold it over her fingers. As she returned to the top of the bus, Devery tossed her a pair of high-heeled black boots, and Ekaitza sat down to put them on as she realised that they were already approaching the capital city of Yukon. Atiqtalaaq had gone all out for this celebration - there was bunting and flares lining the street from several miles out, and people leaning out of their houses to wave.

As the bus pulled up to the Hotel Luxe, Atiqtalaaq gestured for Ekaitza to stand. "First your grandfather. Then the families of the other northerners. Smile, hug, then move on. You can talk to them properly at the reception."

Ekaitza nodded and steeled herself. The crowds outside were thick, and waving, and screaming. There were flashes of cameras, calls of questions she couldn't quite hear. Some of the rebels in their familiar grey khaki were holding back the throng, to form a narrow passage at the edge of which Ekaitza could see the familiar silhouette of her grandfather, hunched over his cane. Beside him was another elderly fellow, a man with a much straighter spine and imposing presence, with a slender teenage girl at his side that reminded Ekaitza so strongly of Saran Altai that she knew there was no doubt this was her twin sister - Naran, wasn't that her name? On the other side of Ekaitza's grandfather was a polished, perfect couple with stony expressions - an elegant woman with long dark hair and a light dusting of freckles, like Yue's, and a dignified man with dark eyes and dark hair, starting to bald. The Yukimuras - Ekaitza distantly remembered Cor saying something about their prominent positions on the northern council. She wasn't sure what. She hadn't really paid attention.

Atiqtalaaq put her hand on Ekaitza's shoulder. "Okay?" The door to the bus was slid open and Ekaitza hastily pushed her hair back off her face. "Go."

Ekaitza stepped down off a bus and instantly felt that dropping sensation in the pit of her stomach - like the world had fallen out beneath her. Men and women pushed and shouted on either side of her, but it sounded so distant, like they were calling to her through glass. Her heart felt like it was beating very hard, and very slowly. It was a kind of animal instinct, she thought, like that of a wolf - something is wrong, something is wrong, something is wrong.

Turn your head.

She turned her head to the right and caught sight of a young man forcing his way through the crowd. He was shouting something. Everything seemed to be moving very slowly as he pulled something from his jacket and pointed it at Ekaitza and shouted, "the liar's whore!"

And then he pulled the trigger.

* * *

"The answer's no."

A fugitive king so rarely had an office or a desk to call his own, but Demetri seemed so perfectly comfortable you could be excused for believing that he had sat behind this desk to issue notices and decrees for the past twenty years. He was languid in his chair, natural in a way that he was rarely seen being - at ease and utterly unencumbered by public perception.

And with that comfort came honesty.

"No?" She smiled.

"I will not permit you to leave my Selection." He leaned back, and rubbed at his eye, looking stressed. "I will not permit you to leave for Angeles." There was no point. The General had been caught in rendez-vous with their spy inside the court. The General had been killed. What were the odds their spy had not?

"Demetri." Vardi Tayna's voice never approached plaintive with her king - it never had. She was not someone who begged, or pleaded, not easily. Even when she had to ask for something, it was always with the tone of one who fully expected the question to be a mere formality to being given precisely what she wanted.

"I need you here."

"The rebellion needs me." Even now, ensconced in the quiet warmth of a borrowed office, with Malone keeping a watchful eye in the window, she sounded a little unpleased that he hadn't agreed instantly.

"Wick was exaggerating." Demetri shot her a look from behind his hand. "And what do you care for the rebellion?" Uzohola's father had been a Saharan ambassador who had smuggled arms to the rebellion when it was still in its nascence, had fed its flame with what money and information he could smuggle out from the capital, had sacrificed his children and his life to the cause. Wick had joined the rebellion out of gratitude, out of desperation, out of righteous anger, after the General had freed him from death row and a future in the ground. But Vardi Tayna had never truly bitten onto the cause of revolution like the others had. She was a good spy, and an even better friend, and it was the latter that kept her tied here, tethered to the insurgency like the wild dog the General had often insisted she was. And Demetri knew that those ties were weakening, loosening - the General was dead, and just like that Vardi Tayna had lost a reason to stay.

Demetri could not allow her to lose another.

"No. You must stay in the Selection." Enyakatho had insisted that Demetri use a fountain pen for official letters, no matter how slow and cumbersome it was proving, so as he spoke he carefully dipped the nib in its inkwell and frowned at the document in front of him. "And I would like to say, Vardi Tayna, my love, how strange I find your sudden passion for the revolution."

Vardi Tayna laughed. "You ask me that after fifteen years in its service?"

"Years?" Demetri's voice was sardonic. Vardi Tayna's early years with the rebellion were pockmarked by long periods of total absence. That was why the General had always called her _kra-chok,_ little sparrow, for sparrows were bound to return home no matter how high or far they flew. "An aggregate fifteen _months _would be a very generous estimate."

"Not all of us are born with revolution in our blood, Demusha." Vardi Tayna leaned forward to put her arms on the table and rest her head on her arms, tilting her eyes upwards to look at Demetri through eyelashes. "Well then. As you say. I owe the revolution some hours."

"You can pay them off in the Selection." Demetri's mouth twitched. "You know, the rebellion can be served in ways other than... lies and secrets and bloodshed."

"The Kingdom, perhaps. But the rebellion?" Vardi Tayna shook her head. "Cannot be served but by slaughter. You know that."

"Allow me my blissful ignorance." Demetri's pen traced across the paper, slower and less sure than Täj's would have been. "There will be a time the rebellion is done and the Kingdom must stand alone. And you must learn to live in the Kingdom, in peace-time, when that is the case. When there is no more fighting."

Vardi Tayna's lip curled."Sounds boring."

"I imagine it will be."

She pushed herself back into an upright position. "You know, Täj and I were talking..."

"You're not meant to be talking to Täj."

She gestured widely with her cigarette, ash flying everywhere. "_Before _the Selection,you zealous all-controlling autocrat." Demetri slashed out a signature and shook his head as Vardi Tayna continued, "we were just saying, when this is all over, and we have you safely installed in Angeles as our beloved monarch and you and your lovely wife are raising your heir and your spare... Täj and I will have to launch our own insurgency against you, just to keep things exciting."

Demetri had to set down the pen, because he was worried his laugh would make his writing unsteady. "Just to relieve the monotony?"

"To keep you on your toes, darling." Vardi Tayna's smile was wicked. "Give you something to talk about on that bloody Report of yours."

"You always were a very thoughtful friend, Vee, thank you."

"Of course, Demusha. The least we could do." She turned in her chair and frowned at the worm-wooded door that divided the office from the narrow set of stairs without, which seemed to be experiencing a quite constant stream of traffic up and down as the Finance Administer on the top floor processed reports from all around the kingdom - both of them. "Could have sworn I heard Uzo."

"She did say she'd drop by," Demetri said distractedly, and stabbed Vardi Tayna in the hand with a pen as she reached to snatch a paper off the desk. "For the king's eyes only, runt."

With a yelp, Vardi Tayna withdrew her hand, a mutinous expression brewing on her features as she made a face at Demetri. Like they were children again."I'm to be your queen, aren't I?"

Demetri's voice was very arch indeed."Are you? I wasn't informed."

"I should hope you're not forcing me to continue in the Selection if I have no hope of winning. What terrible treatment of an old friend that would be."

"When I have I ever treated you _well_, Vardi Tayna?"

"True. You were always a miserable bastard." Vardi Tayna made another move for a report and nearly toppled the chair she had been sitting in as she danced back out of pen-stabbing reach, paper in hand, smile on her face. "And _much _slower than me."

Demetri rolled his eyes. "Do you get along so poorly with Yue Yukimura that you'll pester me all day rather than return to Raphael's?"

"I miss talking to you, if that's what you mean." Vardi Tayna said it very simply. Demetri knew it had to be hard on her, to be so forcibly separated from her friends - though in all the commotion of the escape from the safe-house, he was sure that she had probably found the time to speak to most of the inner circle at some point or another. Nonetheless, it had to grate on one who found it so hard to make friends, and so easy to lose them once again.

"I'm sure I'd be touched if I thought you had a heart."

Vardi Tayna was scanning the report, as Demetri leaned back in his chair and checked his watch. Was this to be the rest of his life? Reading reports, signing legislature, penning letters to foreign nations begging for recognition and aid? It seemed such a paltry and miserable existence that he half-thought he would have to agree to Täj and Vardi Tayna's daft counter-rebellion idea, if only to break up his days. Some more excitement was soon to come his way, because Vardi Tayna was saying, a tone of dark delight in her voice, "the bastard prince is to have a Selection as well?"Vardi Tayna threw Demetri an incredulous look.

"So it seems. Those poor girls."

"Well, now you know the reason you must release me from this Selection. I intend to join Mordred's." Vardi Tayna's eyes glittered with faint glee as she forced a crease into the letter, her browned hands moving surely even as she looked at Demetri. "He's such a _handsome _fellow, don't you think?"

"Say that when Täj is here."

She laughed. She had made the report into a paper airplane, and she launched it at Demetri's head, just as the door swung open to admit Uzohola and Wick; the former's eyebrows rose as she let out a laugh - "I thought we'd be interrupting some date," the co-ordinator said with a slight smile. "But it's just you two being antisocial, holed up here away from nice, normal people."

"I'm _trying_," Demetri said, sounding quite unkingly. "To be productive."

Vardi Tayna shrugged. "I'm not."

Wick dropped into the chair Vardi Tayna had just vacated. "Any luck?"

"None. He won't agree."

Demetri set his jaw, ready for another argument, and for a second Wick seemed inclined to provide it, until Uzohola set a hand on his arm and sent him a quelling look which had the propagandist raising his hands in surrender and shaking his head. "As his Esteemed Excellence commands."

Uzohola moved past Wick to put her arms around Demetri's neck and press a kiss to his forehead as he pushed his papers aside, all the better to focus on his friends. "How's it going?"

"It's been better." Demetri spun his pen between his fingers. "Or did you mean the Selection?"

"Which is bothering you more?"

Wick had left the door open behind him; Täj had drifted in through it, rather like a ghost, and taken up a position leaning against the wall, between a bookshelf and the window. Demetri said, "Theo, can you give us a moment?" and, looking a little surprised, Malone did as he was commanded, casting somewhat curious glances at the group as he did so. Demetri could not help but notice that the mechanic looked so tired that it seemed like he had two black eyes; he made a mental note to ask the rebel what was keeping him so sleepless at night. It was not like Demetri to have initially missed such a sign of distress on one of his companions - this whole situation had clearly distracted and stressed him much more than he had wanted to admit.

"That is a question without an answer, Uzohola, my darling."

She withdrew, and took up a position perched on the corner of the desk; Vardi Tayna had collapsed onto the window seat that Theo had just vacated, her legs akimbo, smoke drifting lazily from the still-lit cigarette in her hand. She silently passed it to Täj for a drag, as Demetri stretched his arms out for the first time in hours and realised that it was the first time in weeks that the inner circle had been assembled like this, all together again - well, nearly. The General's absence was still conspicuous, and there was a clear empty space by the door where Thiago ought to have been pacing. But it was, Demetri thought, the closest they had come to normalcy in - what had it been, a month? More? It hadn't felt that way. Hell, he had only met a quarter of the girls from which he was expected to pick a wife.

"I'm sure this isn't a coincidence," he said, steepling his fingers and looking over them at his oldest friends, assembled like the world's motliest council of advisors. "That you should all decide to pay a visit on the same dreary Monday evening - so, have you all come to offer your input on the girls?"He thought it likely that they had heard he was speaking to Vardi Tayna, and had taken the opportunity to see her as well. Their group had been incomplete for so long. "Or has there been some terrible calamity of which I must be informed?"

"Damn," Wick said lazily. "You didn't hear?" Uzohola kicked him and he receded it quickly. "Nothing, nothing."

Uzohola said, "I'm just here because one of our hosts informed me that we had a truant Selected on our hands." She shot Vardi Tayna a dark look. "But of course, all the Selected know the rules, and would _never _run away to try and barge into the king's office, demanding an audience to say she wanted to leave his Selection because she was bored."

"_Never_," Vardi Tayna agreed, adopting a tone of mock horror.

"She sounds like a bitch," Täj said mildly.

"I can confirm," Wick said. "She is a bitch."

"You know who's _not _a bitch?" Vardi Tayna still had that faint note of delight colouring her voice, and Demetri groaned.

"Don't. I won't have you prejudicing me about the Selection."

"I was going to say something nice!"

"You don't know the meaning of the word."Demetri squinted at her suspiciously. "Okay, _kra-chok_. You get _one _chance."

She folded her arms. "All the girls staying with me at Raphael's are absolutely delightful." She managed to make it sound like a challenge, like she had somehow defeated him by issuing such a compliment.

Demetri muttered, "I can think of one exception," and Vardi Tayna seemed on the verge of searching for something to throw at him. Just like when they were but children - some things, it seemed, never changed.

Before she could, they were treated to a rare second sentence in a conversation from Täj - most unlike him to be so chatty, Demetri thought, and made another mental note to ask him if everything was okay, for him to be so outspoken - as he said, "Atiena's a good sort." Vardi Tayna rolled her eyes. Täj added, "Thiago's taken an interest in her."

"Thiago?" Demetri.

"_Just _Thiago?" Uzohola.

"Täj fancies her," Vardi Tayna said and Täj looked at her, and laughed, and she just shrugged and held back a grin. Some inside joke between those two? Demetri had given up trying to understand them sometimes. They had spent too long together as children, and started to go slightly odd as a result. Her bad influence on him, he had decided long ago, rather than the other way around - for the most part. She seemed quite immune to his paranoid tendencies, although she had clearly picked up his smoking habit. Maybe she thought it was stylish. Vardi Tayna had done far stupider things before for the sake of the impression she made, but doing idiotic things was not entirely out of character for the girl. Täj tended to be a little bit stupider when she was around.

Atiena would be better for him.

"Täj needs to be reminded that the Selected are off limits," Wick said, rather smugly.

Demetri frowned. "What does that mean?"

Uzohola brushed the whole thing off and changed the conversation quickly. "And Liara?" It wasn't clear who she was talking to, but Demetri took the initiative to answer first.

"Fine, I suppose." He glanced around to gauge their reactions.

"She didn't seem too pleased during your last date," Uzohola warned. Demetri almost winced. Well, that had been destined to go poorly. The girl had come fifteen years too late in search of a boy who was long gone - thrown under the wheels of war.

"Or after," Vardi Tayna added. That, too, Demetri could have predicted.

"You treated her like a nuisance," Wick pointed out.

"She _is _a nuisance," Uzohola said bluntly. "I can't believe Givre let her in, he had to know how much more difficult it would make things for us..."

"It's working out fine," Demetri said. "Täj?"

Täj looked away from Vardi Tayna and nodded. No more chattiness from him - Demetri knew it was an odd thing to be relieved about, but routine - habit - _normalcy _had been sorely lacking from this Selection so far, and he found himself rather craving it at this point. A nod and a look was all that Täj needed to communicate with Demetri, so the king inclined his head in acknowledgement and turned back to Uzohola and said, "that seems to be all in hand." He cast a quelling glance around the room, his dark green eyes serious. "I need to arrange dates with... seven of the remaining girls, did you say?"

"Nine," Uzohola said.

"Basically all of them," Wick added.

"I don't see the point." Vardi Tayna shrugged. "High command is just going to decimate them again - what's the point in getting attached?"Täj passed the cigarette back to her, but she seemed rather determined to just use it to emphasise her speaking points.

"Enyakatho needs footage," Wick pointed out. "You know the people at home want to see the Selected in action. Rafa said that there's a town festival coming up in Layeni, you can see a few of the girls there, take them out to events - Saran, Dove, Yukimura."

"And we never celebrated your birthday properly," Uzohola added. "Paloma is planning on reopening one of its skyscrapers next month - we could do a real party on the rooftop for the girls at the Biulu compound, you know, Opal and Elizabeth and... well, you've already met Nina and Soledad."

"I have," Demetri agreed ruefully. Lady Soledad had chewed him out for exactly what they were planning now: orchestrating dates and meetings one after another, treating the girls like objects to be inspected on an assembly line and those that were found lacking marked defective, one after another. What other choice did he have? It was a Selection under the strangest and most restrictive of circumstances - he was rarely ever within fifty miles of the girls, so how else could he be expected to get to know them?

Wick said, quite distractedly, picking at a hole in his jeans, "Eden Lahela needs your attention as well, she's doing some project with Farid?"

Vardi Tayna smiled. "She's doing _what_?"

"Some propaganda piece - she's the scion of the _Axiom_, after all, I'm surprised it took this long." Uzohola shook her head and shrugged. "She offered to help the crew on some filming they were doing near Mrs Klahan's farm, said their script needed rewriting, and Farid let her run with it. Wren sent a message, just there, to say that she suspected there had been something of a coup. If Demetri and high command give the go-ahead, Enyakatho plans to build the next Report around it."

Demetri cocked his head. "Sounds like an interesting girl."

Vardi Tayna rolled her eyes. "That's why she's doing it. To make you think that."

"So it's working. And now I know that she's interesting _and _she's effective." Demetri smiled at Vardi Tayna over his steepled hands. "You should try being interesting if you want to make it into my Elite, Vee."

"I _am _interesting."

"So is the bubonic plague."Demetri had found his list of the remaining Selected - only thirteen left and he had to refer to a list just to keep them all straight in his head. High command had assured him that there would be no more eliminations for the foreseeable future, but even so Demetri wasn't sure there would be enough time to get to know them all. He continued, "Raphael is treating the girls well?"

Vardi Tayna nodded. "As though they were her own flesh and blood."

Demetri sombered. "That's very good of her."

Wick said, once again to no one in particular, "she has mentioned having the king to dinner. To heal old divisions."

"She doesn't have to do that," Demetri said automatically.

"She wants to. She insists."

Uzohola said, quite softly, "she lost everyone, Dimi."

As though he needed a reminder.

Demetri shut his eyes and nodded, taking a deep breath. "I'll write, then - congratulate her on the wedding. Say I'll come around for tea some afternoon, to catch up, to meet Agares, when the girls are out."

"She'd appreciate that a lot," Vardi Tayna said. "As would Bruce."

"Feste is still alive?"

"And kicking."

Demetri smiled. "Miracles are possible after all, it would seem."

Uzohola checked her watch. "Speaking of. Veetee, I promised to have you back at the safehouse for dinner - we'll have to get going."

The rebel girl nodded. As Uzohola turned to hug Demetri and saw goodbye to Wick, Vardi Tayna pressed her cigarette into Täj's hand and said something to him that the king could not hear. She was nearly across the threshold before she paused.

"Oh." Vardi Tayna turned at the door and reached into her pocket. She withdrew a small, hardback book with a blue cover and threw it, quite gently, in Demetri's direction. "For you."

Demetri frowned. "For me?"

"For you. Not from me."

"From who?"

Vardi Tayna looked delighted to correct him. "_Whom_, darling, _whom_."

She winked at Demetri and waved goodbye to Wick, as Uzohola said, "well, boys, let's make sure we have a bottle of scotch with us the next time we meet. The Selection has made you all dreadfully boring."

"Lovely as always, Uzo." Wick rose from his chair as well, saying something about a football match he had promised to play with some of the children at the Layeni orphange, and the three of them left the room with brief goodbyes and a promise to see one another soon - though Demetri knew that Vardi Tayna was returning to the total exclusion of the Selection, until the next time a paltry excuse for a catch-up happened to arise.

The door shut behind them, and as Täj moved from the wall to the chair, Demetri opened the book to find a small note, torn from a sketchpad, between the cover and the first page, with a few sparse lines across its face -

_Your Majesty -_

_Lady Vardi suggested that you might like this book so any blame regarding its unsuitability or critique of its quality should go to her entirely. If you enjoy it, however, I would be delighted to take credit, and also to hear what you thought._

_I would like to thank you for your gifts, and tell you how much I have enjoyed reading them, and how striking a character I found Lin Daiyu, and how tragic and heartbreaking her fate - clearly you are still determined to sway me towards unhappy endings, but I'm afraid you will not find any in this particular book._

_I would also like to say that Mrs Raphael Smetisko has been taking excellent care of us and speaks most highly of you. _

_Thank you very much, _

_Yue Yukimura _

_月__雪村_

The last few words were scrawled and sharp, almost as though she was worried she had written too much, gushed too excitedly, spoken in too forthright a manner. Demetri slipped the note from the book and put it into his pocket, quite carefully, so that he could re-read it later and compose an appropriate reply - though, he thought with a smile, he rather felt he should try to read the novel first, so he could speak to her about it. Or was it one he had read before? No - Vardi Tayna knew him better than that.

Vardi Tayna had helped to select the book? She was helping her supposed competition? That wasn't like her - another deviation from the usual. Demetri didn't like it at all.

Täj tapped some of the ash from his cigarette into the cup of cold coffee Demetri had been nursing since noon. "Honestly." His voice was still somewhat hoarse, despite how well rested he looked. "How are you?"

Demetri sighed. "I can't complain."

"You can. If you want to."

"I don't want to. It's nothing I can't handle." Demetri capped and uncapped his pen and then threw it down in some frustration. What was the point of being king when you felt so restricted, and useless, and unworthy? He wasn't sure why this had just crept up on him all of a sudden - maybe because he'd been on four so-called dates now, had met some of the Selected, had begun to see and understand that image they had begun to build up in their heads of who he was, of who he ought to be.

He would disappoint them. He knew he would.

He was not what they thought he was.

"I believe that," Täj said. "You're Demetri Dunin. Don't forget that." He shrugged. "And you can handle anything."

"Let's not exaggerate _too _much." Demetri took a deep breath, picked back up his pen, and began to make notes on his list of Selected girls - what the inner circle had just said, what he had perceived, what his gut said.

Täj tapped his cigarette against the lip of the cup. "None standing out?" he said, indicating the list sympathetically. Demetri almost smiled. Täj was a dear friend, and the only kind of brother he had ever known, but even Demetri knew that he was not the kind of guy to whom one should go for romantic advice.

Täj was an observant fellow, but he had one crippling blind spot.

"Some," Demetri admitted. "Some more than others. But I haven't met them all."

Täj smiled. "I'll rephrase - any standing out for the wrong reasons?"

Demetri shook his head. "Some," he said again. "Some more than others. But I don't know them very well yet."

"First impressions count for a lot."

Sometimes Demetri wondered how differently his life would be if first impressions were correct - if the inner circle had proven, all those years ago in the Wasteland, to be exactly what they seemed and nothing more, no deeper, just surface-level. If everything was simple, and everyone called each other by their real names, and they were all honest, all of the time, no plots and no intrigue. After a silence, Demetri added, "you know, Vardi Tayna came to see me today. To ask to be eliminated."

There was always something slightly frozen about Täj that the Wasteland never could thaw, but moments like these Demetri always thought he understood why the rebels called him the pale dog, when they thought he wasn't listening. For a moment, only his eyes seemed alive.

Finally, he said, "why would she do that?"

"I was hoping you'd know."

"She's planning something," Täj raised his cigarette to his lips once again. "Tayna is planning something."

"That doesn't surprise me."

"Do you know what it is?" It surprised Demetri a little that Täj did not. Vardi Tayna collected secrets like a magpie collected shiny objects, but Täj was so quiet, so watchful and so ever-present that not much escaped his notice. He was an observant one, their Täj, and always had been. Demetri wondered if his notebooks were already filled with the skeleton of Vardi Tayna's plot, and he was asking Demetri this now only in an attempt to put some conjectural flesh on its bones.

"Not yet." Demetri shook his head. "I imagine the first we hear of it will be when she needs us to bury the bodies with her."

Täj smiled. "Wouldn't have it any other way." He pulled Demetri's list towards him, and began to scan the names silently as Demetri stood from his desk and paced to the window and back in a vain attempt to stretch out his legs.

"Strange group left," Demetri said.

"Suits you just fine, then."

Demetri looked at his old friend. "Täj, this whole Liara situation..." He didn't need to say anymore. Täj saw, and he instantly understood. There were few people with whom Demetri shared such a silent connection.

"If you're worried, then you shouldn't be." Täj was right, in a way. They had got away with that first date, had tided the Angeles girl over for a little longer, assuaged her doubts a tiny bit. That was all they could do for now. And by all accounts, she was a nice enough girl.

Pretty, too.

"I need you to keep an eye on her."

Täj tapped his orbit as a silent gesture of _stop worrying, you don't need to remind me_. Demetri knew he shouldn't worry. If there was something to be seen, Täj would see it - more for Liara's sake than the rebellion's. Now that it was looking more likely than ever that a mole had made it into their ranks, Eden and Liara would be the first to come under scrutiny from the men on the ground, who might not realise just how cloistered and closely supervised the Selected girls had been. And in the meantime, Demetri thought, there was some traitor elsewhere among their number - someone feeding information to Ysabel about Demetri's movements, the location of the safehouse, plans for the Selection. The list of people who had access to all of that information was very short indeed, and Demetri knew that Thiago would ferret them out before long, but it nonetheless grated on him, to know that anyone around him could be accepting the coin of the woman who wanted him dead in return for his head on a stake. One of many reasons that the impromptu rendez-vous with the inner circle had been such a relief - it had been the first time in weeks that he had known for sure that none of the people in the room wanted him dead.

They could have cut his throat years ago if that was the case.


	14. With Muffled Drum

**Chapter Thirteen: With Muffled Drum**

* * *

_The stars are not wanted now; put out every one.  
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun._

\- W.H. Auden

* * *

Someone had been killed.

There was a funeral being held for a rebel in the Wastelands. Opal knew this to be so, only because Enyakatho had arrived at the compound in the early hours of the morning with arms full of clothes that he had thrown at the girls in the room - Liz, Opal, Sol - and Wren had put a small bag of make-up on the empty bed at the end of the room that had been intended for Ekaitza and Farid had shuffled notecards in his hands and distributed them to the Selected saying, quite softly, "learn them by heart, we need this smooth". Opal had taken them, and glanced at them, and had barely the chance to ask what was happening before Enyakatho and his entourage had swept back out of the room in search of their rebel chaperones and Liz was pulling at the clothes and saying, "I swear, they _never _get my colour right".

Sol laughed. Privacy had become rather a thing of the past in the Selection, so as Opal sank onto Ekaitza's abandoned bed to scan through the notes they had been issued, Sol and Liz began to change, shaking out the clothes that had been selected for them and voicing quiet sounds of approval and disapproval at the colour and cut - black and scarlet, conservative and lacy. The notes had similarly been set on blood red paper, written with rich black ink. It was poetry, she thought - no, elegy. She wondered who had chosen them. She wondered why.

One line caught her eye - "_But since it fell into my lot, that I should rise and you should not..." _In her mind, it was her father's soft Scottish accent whispering the words. It was an emigration song of loss, when people could still emigrate. People didn't emigrate anymore. It had once been very common indeed in the rebel enclave of Hansport, hemmed in by Crown provinces on all sides, and some years ago, before the province had fallen to the Kingdom, it had been a most common sight to spot boatfuls of refugees strike out from the shore in desperate hope of reaching some kinder land. Nowadays the seas were still and empty, and no one sang _the Parting Glass _for emigrants anymore.

So Opal knew it was to be a funeral.

They dressed quickly. There was a sense of urgency to the whole situation - Enyakatho banged the wall of their dorm as he passed, making Sol jump, to underline the rush of it all. Opal's dress fit her perfectly, but was, as Liz had earlier noted, not _entirely _to her taste: the bodice was a little too tight, the skirt a little too flowing, but on the whole she had to concede that it was far from the worst garment she had ever worn. Looking at Liz and Sol, she noted they were wearing nearly identical clothes - long lacy sleeves, a sweetheart neckline and a skirt that looked somewhat like a dirndl. Enyakatho had not left them any shoes, so Opal slipped on her own pair of combat boots - the skirt was not long enough to cover them - and waved away Sol's offer of the paltry bag of makeup that had been left behind for them. Hansport had been under rationing for several years now. Hansport girls had grown unaccustomed to cosmetics.

The door to the dorm swung open and Liz in turn swung on whoever entered, ready to tell them to get out again, but it was Nina, in a similar dress to the girls, her hands up as though to defend herself. Nina was one of those girls who was at risk of looking plain if you caught them in the wrong light, but this was certainly not the wrong light - she had emphasised her iron jaw, her high cheekbones, and the time in the Selection had granted her enough rest that her eyes no longer looked so deeply sunken. She looked, Opal thought dourly, entirely too glamorous to be attending a funeral.

And it was to be a funeral. Nina said, "it's a funeral," and Opal looked back down at her red cards, and wondered who had died.

Who had died that the Selected were being drafted out to attend? That was what worried her. _Demetri? _It couldn't be the king. Opal was quite certain it couldn't be the king. They would have heard. They would have been told. Wouldn't they? The other Selected girls would be here. The inner circle would be here. They would have been briefed more, given more guidance, put in more appropriate dresses. Their speeches would have been more carefully penned, more personal or at least pretending to be so, rather than merely stolen from old emigration songs. Surely that would be the case?

Surely it wasn't Demetri?

A small voice in the back of her mind said, _Theo_?

Liz was squinting down at her cards, her lips moving slightly as she read them, and she said, quite darkly, "he didn't actually mean for us to memorize these right _now_, did he?"

"He certainly did." Enyakatho had appeared at the door again. "Not too far to go from here, girls, so let's get going." He quickly ushered them out of the dorm, saying softly, "now, remember, we're going for somber. Sorrowful about the loss of life, but not the loss of _a _life, does that make sense? In mourning, but not grieving. No laughs. No speaking. And just remember, whatever you do, don't stare at the cameras."

"Cameras?" Sol asked, a little disbelievingly.

Nina said from behind Opal, her voice very dark, "the Crown should see what they've done."

"The Crown knows what they've done," Liz snapped. "They don't _care_."

Opal kept her mouth shut, unable to shake that single word from her mind.

_Theo?_

The quiet speculation of the other girls did little to help her dislodge this unpleasant thought as they repeated their now-familiar ritual of piling into one of the low, open-topped trucks that had first ferried them into the compound. The girls were accorded the cab; Wren and Farid climbed into the back with their rifles, and what had first struck Opal as a mere space-saving measure now struck her as a strange security feature, as she turned in her seat to see Farid rapidly loading his gun, a strange and quick ritual that still fascinated Opal just a little bit, so different was it from the loading of the revolver her old boss had kept in the laundromat in case of trouble from rebel or Crown forces alike. Farid made it look so easy - bolt handle up and back, almost violently, magazine in, bolt handle forward and down, and then he threw a magazine to Wren and set his gun across his knees and watched the horizon behind them for any sign of trouble.

Opal couldn't help but feel that Demetri was putting a lot of faith in the shooting skills of two skinny teenagers with outdated bolt-actions, to put into their hands the lives of four young Selected women when the sky could, at any moment, blacken with the buzz and movement of Crown planes, when another air-strike could be imminent at any moment, when the black widow queen had clearly succeeded in killing someone important enough for a funeral and would succeed again, eventually. Wren's rifle was almost larger than she was. Opal thought the diminutive rebel seemed perpetually at risk of breaking her shoulder with the recoil if she tried firing it.

They were out of the Wastelands now, but the land was still mostly arid scrub, filled with tufts of desert grass and flowering bouquets of the flowers her father had called elephant tusks and sparse thickets of very slender gum trees. There was a road here, unlike in the Wastelands, though it was a roughly hewn path of dirt and Opal found it just as uncomfortable as the alternative had been. Enyakatho was driving; the passenger seat had been given over to his camera, while the four girls sat in the back. Sol had to sit on Liz's lap, and nearly hit her head off the roof with every treacherous crevice in the road. Liz, her arms wrapped lazily around Sol's waist, said, "will this be on the Report, then?"

"That's the plan." Enyakatho spun the steering wheel to skirt around a pile of abandoned rebar in the middle of the road. "Mainly updates about recent successes in St George, exam results in Yukon, fisheries in Hansport." Opal looked up from her notes at the mention of her hometown, but found that the director seemed to be speaking about little of interest. "Lady Eden scripted and filmed a piece about war widows in the east, then there's this funeral, and then, well..." Enyakatho shrugged. "I don't know how much has been mentioned to you guys about the plan for the next few weeks."

"Well," Nina murmured. "Nice to hear there _is_ a plan."

She said it softly enough that Opal thought Enyakatho probably hadn't even heard her, but Opal shot her fellow former Seven a look nonetheless. Nina didn't seem to have looked at her notes at all, but was moving the cards in her hands, not quite nervous but somehow impatient, brusque. Opal thought she could understand. The day had been oddly claustrophobic, since Theo had dropped her off at the compound. Sol had gone on a short date with Demetri the day before, and had returned from it ever-so-slightly despondent. "I may have scolded the king," Opal had heard Sol confide in Liz over their paltry lunch earlier that day, and Liz had responded, "well, did you or didn't you?"

"I think I did."

Liz had laughed under her breath. "At least you made an impression."

Sol looked like that date was probably on her mind right now. If the Selected girls were being brought to this funeral, then surely the king would be there also?

Unless he was in the ground.

Opal shook her head. "_Ró-dorcha_," she murmured to herself softly. "_Fiú uaim_." Too dark, even for her. There came a point that cynicism became fatalism, and considering she wasn't sure whose funeral it was going to be, she thought it best to reserve some depth of despair to which she could plunge should the funeral be for Demetri.

Or Theo.

Or Demetri.

No, she thought, it couldn't be Demetri's funeral, because the scene before them was far too motley and disorganised for the funeral of a king, even a king as paltry as the king of ashes, lord of dust, whatever other insulting terms the Crown used to denigrate the Kingdom in Exile. She half-expected to see vultures circling in the sky above as the truck pulled up and the girls filed out into the dusty shared space that divided the assembled rebel mourners from the narrow hole they had hewn into the ground - not even six foot deep, Opal thought. As the truck approached, the buzz from the rebel group seemed to have, for the first time that Opal could remember, died down. There was another truck parked beside Enyakatho's, with a shape lying on its open bed, wrapped neatly in old sheets and tarpaulin, secured with baling twine at the shoulders and ankles.

"Girls," Enyakatho said. "Over here, over here, just form a nice neat line on this side of the grave... There you have it. Learned your lines, have you?" He turned towards the man on the other side - Opal couldn't remember his name. "Where's himself?"

"Inbound."

"Alright. We'll get the camera set up."

Another ripple of talk amongst the rebels. Opal couldn't escape the fact that many of the men and women in the mourning pack were casting dark, somewhat dirty looks in the direction of the Selected. There was ugly chat circulating, she thought, something unfriendly in the way that they watched the four girls, a harsh look in their eyes. Opal knew that some of the girls - Lissa, Atiena, Marjorie - had made the acquaintance of a few of their guards, but they had been kept thoroughly insulated from the ordinary rank-and-file forces of the rebellion, first in the safehouse and then at the compound. Uzokuwa and Arzu and the others had always had something gregarious about them; these men and women still had dirt on their hands and blood on their faces, loaded guns on their backs and knives in their boots. They all looked so much hungrier than the others. Some of them had daubed black coal dust under their eyes, two small dots, in a small sign of mourning and grief - though Opal privately thought it looked a little bit more like war-paint. In her clean, tailored mourning dress, with her hair neatly put back off her face, Opal abruptly felt unpleasantly, ostentatiously out-of-place. Like there was a target on her back. These people clearly knew the person who had died. Had maybe loved them. And now these glossy strangers were being marched out in front of cameras to legitimise and validate their mourning, to make a spectacle out of it. Opal had no reason to cry for the body in the truck.

Unless it was Demetri.

Unless it was Theo.

It wasn't.

She came to that realisation almost dazedly, as a final car pulled up between the two trucks and Demetri appeared at the passenger side, dressed not in the black of mourning but as he had dressed on the last Report - a dark green fisherman's jumper, the same colour as his eyes, and worn jeans that would have looked more in place on one of the rebels in the motley group than on the king of their new nation. There was a tear over one of his knees, Opal saw, its frayed edges stained with a little bit of blood, and she could not say why, on today of all days, she found that to be such a strange and note-worthy detail.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," Demetri called, and went straight past the Selected girls to embrace one of the men nearest to the grave, a short blond rebel with a scar on his face. "Absolutely no words for it. Condolences don't cut it." It was strangely gratifying, Opal thought, to see how the king was welcome at once within the group - not like the Selected girls, subject to uncertain looks and whispers behind their backs, but all of a sudden totally and undeniably one of their own. "He would have wanted it like this. He went down fighting."

_He_, Opal thought, and then saw Theo slide out of the car that had chauffeured Demetri to the funeral. Opal saw him, and he saw her, and Opal looked away and focused on Demetri as the king withdrew, hugged another, withdrew. There were pats on the shoulder, commiserations, a few sprinkles of laughter, and Enyakatho nodded and the cameras started rolling even as Demetri shook hands, inspected war wounds, wiped away tears and, eventually, called for the body to be brought to the grave.

Rebel burial traditions weren't stringent. There weren't even all that many traditions. The body was pulled from the back of the truck, and thrown into the roughly hewn grave, none too gently. Sol and Opal seemed the only two of the Selections to be perturbed at this harsh handling of the corpse - Opal supposed that the miner and the farmer both had some experience with death, and how tangible and close and imminent it seemed when there was a dead body in front of you. Even still veiled, Opal could not shake how viscerally uncomfortable a sight it was to see a husk without any consciousness or soul left within, something so heavy and so human in appearance and yet utterly, entirely dead.

There was some conversation on the rebel side of the grave - "_had he belief_?"_"belief? tons." "religion? ehhhh" "we should say a few prayers just in case he was wrong, ha?"_ \- and Demetri said, looking down into the grave, "our Selected ladies have prepared a small tribute for our lost friend. They never knew him, but they wanted to offer some small piece of comfort."

More rumbles. Did Demetri know how unpopular his Selection seemed to be amongst the ordinary rebels? Opal knew it wasn't personally directed at her, or hoped it wasn't, but it was still far from fun to be the focus of so much negative attention at an honest-to-god _funeral_. Nonetheless, Demetri caught her eye, and nodded, and offered an encouraging smile, and Opal realised that her position at the end of the line of the Selected probably meant that she was due to go first in whatever small speech Enyakatho had prepared for them on red cards. She could not hold back from looking down at her red notes, and heard Wren chuckle softly behind the camera, and realised with some relief that she had indeed been accorded only pieces from the Parting Glass for her speech. No self-respecting Scot, part or entire, would struggle to recite it. Opal could remember her father singing it at her grandfather's funeral, his voice rough and imperfect and faltering, but low and emotional and honest.

"Oh all the time that e'er I spent, I spent it in good company. And all the harm that e'er I've done, alas, it was to none but me. And all I've done for want of wit, to memory now, I can't recall, and all the comrades that e'er I've had are sorry for my going away..."

She could feel Theo's eyes on her, but refused to let it unsteady her. Instead, she focused on the grave in front of her, the dead stranger within, the king standing beyond with calm eyes and an encouraging smile.

The poem should have been sung. That was really all that Opal could think. She took a deep breath, and concluded, her voice soft."So fill to me the parting glass. Good night and joy be with you all."

Murmurs amongst the rebels. Enyakatho nodded, swivelled the camera to Nina, and Opal could not help but realise that Demetri had still not looked away, though Nina had begun to speak, and as Opal lowered her head, she realised that Theo was still looking at her as well.

Each of the Selected girls spoke. They had nice words, nice sentiments, but it was all, Opal thought, so generic. It could have been a funeral for anyone. For no one. There was nothing personal here. Just poetry taken from others, songs spoken rather than sung. But maybe that was how the rebels did things. She doubted they had any ability, time or inclination to prepare eulogies while they were on the run in the Wastelands. Maybe they would usually just dump the body under the soil and keep running. Maybe they were only holding a funeral for the sake of the Selection and its cameras.

Liz was the last to speak, and when she concluded there was a long silence across the group during which all eyes turned to their king - even Theo's. Demetri looked away from Opal, and gazed into the grave, and pulled from his pocket a chain with a pair of dog-tags on its end and a small, gold coin. His voice was very soft, but he spoke with sincerity and confidence. "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today," he began, and a ripple of laughter wavered out across the group. "No, no." Demetri shook his head. "Wrong occasion."

He paused.

"Funerals are a time for sadness," Demetri said. "Grief. Mourning. But I'm not sad. Are any of you sad?" He paused. "I'm angry."

Some cheers.

"We are accused of terrorism," he said. "if we dare to speak about the remains of a homeland that is scattered in pieces and in decay. In decadence and disarray. About a homeland that is searching for purchase among the wastes, a nation that no longer has a face."

He cast his gaze about the assembly, almost in challenge.

"We are accused of sedition," the king said - and for the first time, Opal did see him as the king, a calm and perfectly composed young man with some sort of invisible power in his veins that had driven young men and women to throw themselves under the wheels of war and into early graves. "If we are to speak about a homeland that has nothing left of its great ancient verse, but that of wailing and eulogy. About a homeland that has nothing in its horizons. About a homeland where all birds are not allowed to sing. About a homeland whose writers use invisible ink."

There were murmurings. Opal still wasn't entirely accustomed to the rebel style of audience - it was a most active form of listening, one where people in the crowd would holler in response to things their king had said, would boo at any mention of the Crown, would call out contributions both satirical and serious.

"We are accused of barbarity," Demetri said. "If we refuse to negotiate with the wolf. Lady Liz."

Liz jumped to be called out in such a fashion. Her eyes wide.

"Lady ELizabeth. Your people ran a farm, did they not?"

"They did, your Highness."

"So you can tell me. When the wolves come for your land and for your stock and for your children in the fields, do you ask it nicely to stop?"

"No."

"Do you negotiate terms of surrender?"

"No."

"Do you kneel, and allow it to slaughter as it will?"

"No."

"Then tell me, Lady Elizabeth. What do you do?"

Liz said, softly, "you kill it."

"You kill it. You cut off its head and tear out its teeth." Demetri stood over the grave. He flicked the coin in his hand and allowed it to drop into the grave. "There is no time for grief. The Crown has killed my father twice over. It has taken from me now one of my most beloved childhood friends. After so much loss, we cannot be sad. He would not wish that we did. We cannot mourn. He would not allow us. We must be angry. _That _is his legacy. Revolution."

Someone in the assembled band of mourners shouted, "_M'adhlactar sinn, fásaimid!_"

Opal translated for the girls next to her, her voice very soft, as she scanned the crowd for whatever Celt had shouted the slogan. "If you bury us, we will merely grow."

Nina smiled. "I like that."

Demetri gave the signal for the grave to be filled. Even as this was done, the crowd dissipated almost immediately, rebels splitting off into small groups and walking to the edge of the grave to pay their respects before leaving in clumps, pausing only to grasp Demetri's hand and speak of retribution and cast suspicious looks in the direction of the Selected girls. Enyakatho and his team were packing up their cameras; Farid called to Theo to drive them home, saying that Demetri intended to drive himself home, and Theo was close enough that Opal could hear him asking if that was really all that wise a decision. The Selected girls were permitted to break rank, only for Liz to immediately pull hers on others: "we should pay respects," she said firmly, and marched up to the edge of the grave, her gaze a challenge in Enyakatho's direction to try to tell her to otherwise as she bent her head over the body. Nina copied her, and Sol copied her, and Opal drifted behind them and mimicked their movements, feeling abruptly exhausted beyond words. A weariness had settled in her bones. She thought of how tired and jaded all of the other rebels had looked. She wondered how many of these funerals they had attended. She wondered how many lay ahead.

If something happened to one of the Selected, would this be how they were buried? A dozen people beside a hole in the ground, some empty platitudes, and down thrown the soil. Would there be cameras? Or would they just be burned, like most? Nina was saying something now about how she had heard that burials were too much effort, and accorded only to those who were very important - but was this really all they could muster for one who was very important?

_If you bury us, we will merely grow_.

She wondered how often they had shouted that as they committed a friend to the earth.

She wondered if any of them actually bought into that nonsense.

She wondered how many bones had been buried to produce this narrow, faltering revolution.

The other girls were moving back towards the truck, but as Opal backed away from the lip of the nearly-filled grave, Demetri extended his hand to indicate that she should wait with him, so she did so, aware that Theo and Liz were casting her watchful looks, one more curious than the other. Demetri still had those dog-tags clenched in his hands, but he seemed quite relaxed, calm, composed. Kingly, she supposed was the word.

"Lady Opal," he said. "Of Hansport."

"That's me." She paused. "Your Majesty."

"Thank you for attending." The trucks were filling up, soil spinning from under the wheels of one as it took off. "It means a great deal to the others that they do not have to mourn alone." He paused. "I had hoped we might have the chance to introduce ourselves, and I will accompany you back to the safehouse. Please let me know if that is not to your liking."

Opal could not deny that she was curious about their odd, aloof king, and she shook her head and said, "I would be honoured." She paused. "I'm very sorry about your friend. You have my most sincere condolences."

He smiled, very briefly. "We knew each other as boys. We lost touch. But I will miss him."

"As boys?"Opal's voice was slightly uncertain. Had this been some defector from the court, some commander's son who had deserted in search of his childhood friend, a Liara before Liara?

"When I first joined the rebellion. We were often put together, he and I. The General thought we might keep one another out of trouble - well, I tended to get him into scrapes more often than the other way around." When he smiled, Opal had the sudden, overwhelming impression that he was just a young man, the same age as herself, and human despite the responsibility on his shoulders. He looked almost kind. Demetri pressed the dog tags into Opal's hands, and withdrew, and started to walk, almost absent-mindedly, away from the grave so that she had to hurry to catch up with him. There was a single word on the engraved metal: HERRY. "I enjoyed your recitation," Demetri added.

"Would have sounded better sung."

"Do you sing, Lady Opal?"

"God, no. No." She shook her head. "Funerals are painful enough without all that, sir."

"_Sir_," Demetri said exasperatedly.

"Is there something else I should call you, _sir_?" Opal could not help herself.

"I'll put some thought into it and get back to you."

"Do."

"I overheard you translating what Leith said earlier. You speak Gaidhlig?"

"Just enough to order a coffee."

"Don't talk to me about coffee. I thought getting out of the Wastelands might mean I could get a decent cup someplace, but I've been disappointed."

Opal laughed. "My dad used to say that I had caffeine in my veins rather than blood."

"Life of a student?"

"I had three jobs." She paused. "And a college course."

He squinted at her almost suspiciously. "You know, _my _friends say I'm a workaholic. I think I need to bring you along as my counter-argument."

Opal couldn't say why she was so glad to hear that he had friends. So much of what she had seen of the young king had seemed strangely, awfully lonely - a single figure on the Report, a lone silhouette in the office of the military compound, speaking to crowds by himself. She had known the inner circle served as his informal court, but she had never connected that thought with the idea of _friends_. Like if there wasn't a war, would they go to the movies together, play pool, go drinking? She couldn't picture it. She said, "what's your personal best?"

He understood almost instantly. "Eighty."

"Eighty five." Opal had once gone three and a half days without sleep, a fact that her mother had always said she took far too much cynical pride in. She shook her head. "I was hallucinating by the end of it."

Demetri, she was glad to see, seemed to find this impressive and slightly concerning rather than absolutely bizarre."Might have been too much caffeine?"

"I was thinking it wasn't _enough_."

"Priority one," Demetri said, "once I get to the city. Decent coffee."

"Have mercy on the rest of us and bring some back, but?"

"The kinder thing might be to let you get your own." Demetri paused and leaned on the car. He had rolled up his sleeves, as he frequently seemed to. He looked more comfortable like that. Up close, Opal could see precisely how closely his dark green eyes matched his jumper. "I know you guys probably have cabin fever."

You guys, Opal thought, not you girls. Not you ladies. A small detail, but a sign that, if he wasn't comfortable, he was certainly feigning comfort masterfully.

"So thanks for your patience," he added. "I know it isn't easy to just be... trapped doing nothing in the middle of a rebellion. Especially when you're so used to being busy."

Opal shrugged. "It's been a paid vacation."

"You must have a very odd family," Demetri mused. "To have air strikes on your vacations."

That startled a laugh out of her. "Ah, no, we're ordinary enough for people who live in a lighthouse."

Demetri looked surprisingly delighted with this fact. "A lighthouse?"

"When I was younger. Pa used to have the night shift, so we'd spend one week up there with him and one week down in the house with my a-me."

"Who's we?"

"Me. My sister, Ruby."

"Ruby and Opal?"

She waved away this most common of questions. "They're good names."

"I didn't say they weren't." Demetri was smiling faintly. "You must miss her. Your sister, I mean."

Opal decided to be honest. "I do."

"What is she like?"

"She's... the most cheerful person on the planet. I don't think she ever stops smiling, or dreaming." Opal hadn't allowed herself to think about her family in weeks, but talking about her sister was surprisingly sorrowful. She hadn't even been able to get a letter to them. She hadn't spoken to them since the day she had left Hansport.

Demetri must have noticed. "I understand how you feel. To be estranged from one's sibling is a very strange bereavement."

Of course. Opal almost laughed. Demetri's brother was trying to kill him.

She indicated the grave. "You seem familiar with bereavement, sir."

A shadow flitted across his face. "Unfortunately. I've buried many friends. I've been deprived the opportunity to bury many, _many _ others."

Opal wound the chain of the dog tags around her fingers, and was for a moment unsure of what to say.

She was saved by Demetri continuing, "such is revolution."

"_M'adhlactar sinn, fásaimid."_

"That's the idea." Demetri smiled. "It's from a much longer chant, but that's the line that stuck with us. Seemed suitably underdog."

"It's a good line." Opal twisted the chain of the tags, and decided to risk one more question. After all, it had taken her this long to get to speak to the man - she knew this was likely to be her first, and last chance. "The others didn't seem too happy to have us there."

"They were in mourning. They tend to close ranks when they grieve."

"Are we unpopular? The Selected, I mean?"

She could see that Demetri was also trying to decide whether or not to be honest with her. "Unpopular isn't the word."

"What is the word?"

Demetri looked slightly pained; the words were torn from him almost reluctantly. "Obviously everyone has their own favourites. Everyone roots for a different girl. Such is the nature of the Selection."Opal knew this already. Saran and Yue were favourites in the north; the south seemed to favour Atiena and Nina so far. Liara and Eden were popular amongst Kingdom loyalists in Illéa.

Opal didn't think she was popular anywhere except Hansport.

He moved around to the door of the car and opened it. "Many in the Kingdom would like to see a queen who understands the struggle they went through to win their nation. Who participated in the struggle. A queen who has blood on her hands. A queen who has cried at these funerals and hunted wolves all her life."

Opal said, "is that what _you _want, Demetri?"

Demetri said, "I don't tend to _want _anymore, Lady Opal."

Opal paused, and nodded, and slid into the car as Demetri did the same. They were still filling the grave, she saw, and she saw also that they were not bothering to mark it any way. Just another set of bones in the ground, she thought, another seed for the growing rebellion. _M'adhlactar sinn, fásaimid._


	15. Make Good The Cosmic Ache

**Chapter Fourteen: Make Good The Cosmic Ache**

* * *

_I am your land. You are my sky.  
How shall we speak a world's goodbye?_

\- Lucy Berry

* * *

She knew she was still alive.

Her nerves had rusted in her skin, her limbs slow and hard to move, and the stale air of the room scorched as hot as the hinges of hell through her lungs, but that was good, that was a good sign because dead girls didn't move and dead girls didn't breathe, not at all, not at all, and this girl did so this girl knew that she was still alive even if that was hard to believe right now, with lead eyelids and concrete bones and the drip drip drip of blood in the corner of the room and the faraway sound of people above and below her.

In a room full of dead people, she was very glad to know that she was still alive.

She had not realised she had slept until she was awake again, awake and wishing for sleep. She had slept, and she had dreamed. She had dreamed the very same as a child - of flies raining from the sky and coins glittering below a sheet of ice and the crunch of bone on bone, so the morning always came as a relief, cold and perfect, the atrocious sunrise burning away any traces of the stars but sparing the dusky mist that clung to the roadsides with the tenacity of a constrictor.

She didn't know how long she had laid here, cold stone behind and below her, her breath coming slow and shaky, lying against the wall like a broken thing, all of her strings cut. Sometimes she thought that she could hear someone else breathing beside her, not very far away, and sometimes she thought she could hear heartbeats, a dozen within the room, uncertain and faltering, a thin, wavering staccato. She wasn't sure if she was dreaming them, those heartbeats. She had closed her eyes a very long time ago, when keeping them open had seemed a pointless endeavour, and for a very long time she had barely noticed the difference. In the narrow slit between eyelids where she could see the world, she could only stare at the dark wall opposite her, and that was no improvement at all.

She didn't mind so much. This lethargy was better than what had come before it – when sleep had evaded her with the tenacity of a fennick fox, when she had difficulty keeping her skeleton where it was supposed to be, when her veins had turned to live wires and every faint movement of air across her skin had felt as though her flesh was being stripped whole from her bones and leaving her nerves exposed, bare and raw and vulnerable. That had been worse.

Little white flowers unfurled themselves against the dark canvas of her eyelids, star-shaped explosions of light that burst as sudden as a heart-attack and left scarlet marks like wounds floating in the empty space even as they faded, and the buzzing murmur of voices under the floor ebbed and waned, slowly, like she was tuning a radio, bringing the disparate components of the world around her into a cohesive whole. And then she was suddenly aware of a voice right there, just beside her, speaking to her directly.

"Can you hear me?"

She would have preferred that she couldn't.

"Lady? Lady, if you can hear me..."

Her face was pressed into a pillow, and though all of her nerves seemed to have been dulled by whatever analgesic was pumping through her veins, she could tell even through the haze of lifting lethargy that it was one of the hard, straw-stuffed bolsters typical of the far north, rather than the softer, feather-plumped pillows to which she had become accustomed in the south. The overwhelming scent was that of bleach and iodoform, but there, at the back of it all, the sharp tart odour of near-dissipated phosgene that served as a persistent backdrop to Baffin.

So. Was she home?

She didn't dare to hope.

"Can you move your hand for me?"

" _'__I__idha qult nem_," she muttered groggily, her tongue lying like a half-dead carcass capable of only minute movement, her teeth seeming almost foreign to her, her whole mouth feeling somehow fuller than before. "_B__akarrik utziko nauzu_?"

"What's she saying?" The voice from before, the question clearly directed towards another.

A gruff voice, all humour stripped from its bones. "She's asking if you'll leave her alone if she says yes."

She thought she might try to open her eyes. She wasn't optimistic about the result, for they seemed to have been sewn shut, and she almost feared that her lids might rip if she tried. But she did try. She was not in the habit of allowing such trivial matters as injury hold her back.

It was like a layer of gauze had been thrown over everything, over the entire world: her eyes, clouded by that grey of disuse, like dust had settled over her pupils, and her ears, the sound distant and far-away. The buzz behind her eyes were hornets and flies, crawling over her threads of her thoughts before they could coalesce. She knew why she was here, and she knew she did - but the memory spun away before she could grasp it.

Something tugged at her veins, the tube going into her arm, the needle jammed into her flesh, but all of the sinews and bones that composed the girl called Ekaitza Jones resisted her commands even as she ordered herself to turn her head and look, look, look, just look.

But look she did, and she forced her hand up as well. She found the little plastic nub of the tube, acrid in its incongruity, and she pulled it, hard, and bit her lip against the sudden sharpness of the pain, surprising after so long half-asleep, her mind and nerves dulled and quieted. But pain was good, she tried to convince herself – pain meant she was still alive. She wrapped her fingers around the tube again, and tugged again, slower this time, approaching gentleness, and it began to slide free, spilling something dark across her arm. Metallic. Blood.

It _hurt_.

"Fucking hell!" Her tongue still resisted her attempt at profanity, but there was a low rumble of laughter from somewhere in the room and a pair of calloused hands settled over hers to stop her from yanking the IV out in full.

"I know they do it in the movies." The first voice again. "But trust me. Not a good idea."

Ekaitza's voice did not lack in venom, though it wavered. "You're _poisoning_ me."

"It's _saline_."

"That's _exactly_ what a poisoner would say."

"Ekai." The gruff voice from before. Her grandfather was hunched over his cane in the corner of the infirmary, looking like he wanted to be absolutely anywhere else. "_F__alaykun_. Let it be."

She muttered something dark under her breath, and pushed in vain at the mattress to push herself up into a seated position, swatting away the first voice's attempts to help her. The first voice, she saw now, belonged to an olive-skinned man with close-cropped black hair and enough stubble to suggest that Ekaitza's coma had been keeping him occupied. He had an accent which suggested he came originally from the Maghreb Republic, just as Ekaitza's grandfather had, and the kind of broad and calloused hands that only came from a long life on the taiga or on the oil rigs, like any self-respecting Baffin man. There was a small nest of blankets and half-read books gathered around the chair beside her low infirmary camp-bed, where someone had been keeping vigil; she highly doubted that her grandfather had been so inclined.

Every muscle hurt as she looked about herself, but nothing so sharp as to suggest where the bullet might have struck her.

"Where…?" She looked at the doctor, and he took her hand and guided it to the side of her head, where her right temple had been thoroughly padded by layers and layers of gauze and bandaging. Her head had been shaved. All her hair was gone.

She remembered being shot.

"The bullet travelled fifteen inches from the side of your right eye," the doctor explained softly. "Then travelled through your neck to land in your shoulder. We removed part of your skull to allow for your brain to swell, and sewed the bone under the skin by your hip to keep it alive – you'll need another surgery in about six weeks to repair that particular damage, but plenty of people have lived the rest of their lives quite happily with bits of their head missing."

"By rights," her grandfather cut in. "You shouldn't be alive."

"Brain damage?"

"Minimal." The doctor smiled.

"No more than usual," her grandfather agreed.

"Was anyone else hurt?"

She could tell from their expressions that they didn't want to tell her.

Saran's family? Yue's parents? Devery? Or any number of the people who had turned out to see her supposedly triumphant return? What could have happened?

Beyond her grandfather, they had run out of beds on which to store the bodies. So they had stacked them on top of one another in extensive rows, long sheets of gauze thrown over them to shield their identities from the world, blood leaking slowly through the fabric.

The Selection abruptly felt an entire world away.

But she knew better, right now, than to push the question.

"Thank you very much for saving me, Doctor…?"

"Please, call me Atsegina."

Ekaitza almost smiled. An apt name for a doctor, meaning _kind one_. A feminine name, but then, living with Uzohola for so long had rather stripped those sorts of things of any huge implication.

"I owe you a debt, Atsegina."

"Not at all." Atsegina smiled. "I should thank _you_. I've lost a lot of people during this war. I'm not really used to patients who refuse to die."

Ekaitza shrugged, and then visibly winced as doing so jarred the IV in her arm. "Well, I never was the co-operative sort."

* * *

Demetri hadn't realised he still knew how to be nervous, but standing outside the watchmaker's house, he felt his nerves start to fray a little at the edges. He had, on Uzohola's instructions, brought flowers - the kind that Raphael had always liked, purple hyacinths and white tulips, somehow managing to seem washed out amongst all the mad colour of the town. Flowers, he thought grimly, really, just flowers? For all the misery he had put Raphael through, he thought she deserved much more.

The door to the house swung open, at precisely the stroke of eight o'clock. Demetri was glad that the Selected girls were not in the house to hear the bitterness in Raphael's voice - he wasn't sure they would have ever thought of him in the same way had they heard how the watchmaker spoke to her supposed king. "Your Majesty."

Demetri seemed to have abruptly lost his voice. He hadn't seen Raphael in... years. Seven years? "Rafa."

She stood in the threshold, but seemed unwilling to admit him to the house. "You've heard what Oscar Wilde said about losing parents? Once is a tragedy, twice, carelessness."

Demetri pressed his lips together, and nodded.

Raphael's voice shook a little. "That's three times I've had my family stolen from me. Three times. Gross negligence on my part, isn't it?"

"Rafa."

"First the king killed our parents. The Crown killed my sisters." Her voice was very cold. "Then Gabriel butchered himself in the name of the rebellion."

All he could say was, as the General had said so many times before, "the nature of rebellion is to make sacrifices. You know that as well as anyone." Eggs. Omelettes.

Raphael's voice was like ice. "I'll never forgive Klahan for what he did to you." She jerked her head. "Take off your shoes and come in. Agares can't wait to meet you."

* * *

Liara wasn't entirely sure where they were going – Atiena had arrived into their shared bedroom simply with the news that they had been instructed to get ready to go out. Over the past weeks, the girls had gone out to Layeni for walks, for visits to the libraries and trinket shops, for Report segments on the Selected candidates helping orphans and learning about the culture of the Kingdom in Exile. But Liara wasn't prepared to question it too much. Any glimpse at the Kingdom was an insight into the rebellion, and any insight into the rebellion was an insight into the man who led it – even if Liara had not glimpsed Demetri in several long days. So she did as she had been told, and went down to the back courtyard to wait for the other girls, and caught sight as she stepped out of the door of Täj reclining against the wall encircling the compound, Feste the nameless dog lazing at his side, basking in the early evening sun.

The pale man was dressed in a pale blue sweater and faded jeans with a hole over the knee, barefoot with slightly bedraggled hair, like he had been roused from sleep for the purposes of dinner. It was so strange, Liara thought – until this moment, she wasn't sure she had fully realised how young he was, how close in age to the Selected girls, maybe even younger than the King of Dust himself. Vulnerable wasn't the word, for he was still so pale and sharp and watchful that there was no scope left for softness, but maybe she could call it an openness, a youth, a humanity that Liara had never quite perceived in him before this moment, otherwise unremarkable in its mundanity. His pale blonde hair had grown too long, and was curling about his collar. He still had bandages on his fingers, starch white against the more muted, dirty colours of his clothes.

She gestured to his attire. "I'm feeling slightly overdressed," she said, rather sardonically, but in truth she thought that if there was any chance of seeing Demetri, then the opposite was entirely true – she was clad in just a simple slip dress, its fabric a deep violet hue, and a pair of ballet flats loaned to her by Raphael's wife, Agares, which were slightly too small for her and pinched at the toes. All of the other girls had similarly resorted at this point to second-hand clothes, borrowed from the Smetiskos or bought from the tiny serpentine markets which choked this town's streets, most of Raphael's clothes far too big and long-legged even for the willowy Atiena, who was the tallest of the girls, while Agares' clothes, conservative and concealing, tended not to suit given the unbearable heat of the sun overhead at all times. "Should I change?"

"The king won't be there," Täj said, almost as though he had read Liara's mind. "It's just dinner."

Liara frowned. They had grown into a sort of routine as of late – the girls and Raphael and Agares dining together, a pseudo-family in the cramped kitchen, communal dishes passed around the table and quiet chatter maintaining a near-constant buzz for the ensuing few hours in which they ate and shared stories and made tea and cracked jokes about the whole strange experience. As divorced as this all was from Liara's expectations of a Selection – the prospect of the same had been mentioned, on occasion, in passing, as Mordred drew closer to seizing power from his regent mother, and it had always rather gone without question that Liara would find a place therein – she could not deny that it had, in its own odd way, been a nice way to get to know the other girls. Without Raphael's insistence on "family dinners", she thought it highly likely that she would never have learned of Saran's acute empathic abilities, Atiena's marked intensity and determined focus, Yue's quiet love for the arts, Lissa's love of more outlandish theories. They were alternately shy, guarded, and suspicious girls, and Liara had a creeping impression that without Raphael's insistence on time spent together, they might never have grown past greetings and pleasantries.

"Ms Smetisko has some prior engagement," Yue said softly. Atiena and Yue had stepped out onto the porch behind Liara; Atiena was wearing some of Raphael's refitted camo trousers and a black tank top which left her strong arms bare, and Yue had adopted one of Agares' long floral skirts with a pale pink camisole that reminded Liara a little of the primroses that Ysabel had always grown in the third garden of the palace.

"She specifically needs us out of the house for that?" Atiena seemed unable to keep down her eyebrow. "Interesting _engagement_."

Atiena always was the cynical sort. Liara had to say that she rather enjoyed that quality. There were very few people in the safehouse willing to give voice to the pervasive air of pessimism and near-certain doom which seemed to suffuse the whole strange atmosphere of the Selection. And it was better Atiena that did say these things, rather than Liara herself. She needed to keep her head down, caught in that awkward position where she needed to make an impression on the king while eschewing the attention of all of his followers, lest she attract it for entirely the wrong reasons. Never before had she realised that a childhood in the court of Mordred would train her so perfectly for infiltration of a rebel kingdom, but anyone who was expected to dine with Ysabel learned very quickly to perfect their poker face, do what they had to do, and watch their tongue.

Täj didn't say anything in response, but pushed away from the wall, and gestured that they should follow him. The restaurant towards which they headed was one that Liara had passed several times over the past few weeks, but into which she had never quite ventured; it had a beautiful set of pale purple shutters pinned open to expose a set of frosted annealed glass, rippling with golden light from the lamps and candles which lit the dining area within. The staff recognised them as they walked in – or at least, they seemed to recognise Täj – and silently guided the motley group into a back room, decorated with a very low table around which was scattered stools and brightly coloured cushions, illuminated from the walls by a soothing amber light which spilled romantically across every surface. To Liara's surprise, the propagandist Wickanninish Harjo and the orphanage girls – tiny, feisty Saran and wild, dreamy Lissa – were already settled there, glasses of wine set on the table in front of them.

Täj sank into the seat next to Wick as the girls picked their positions – Yue angled immediately for Saran, as she was wont to do, and Liara and her roommate, Atiena, picked spots on the other side of the table, to ensure a mostly even distribution of people. To her amusement, she saw that Täj had already produced his tiny silver snuff box and was rolling a new cigarette, as though he could stand to inhale clean air for only a few seconds at a time. He caught her watching him, and made a face, and Liara could not hold back the tiny smile which followed.

"How has your week been, ladies?" Wick had an endearing, broad smile that he used to great effect now, looking relaxed as he reached forward for his glass of wine. "Rafa keeping you busy?"

Yue nodded. "We spent a lot of time out by the minefields," she said, her gaze flicking anxiously around to ensure that no one thought she was speaking out of turn. She always got so nervous around dinnertimes – any mealtime, really. Liara was pretty sure she knew why, but she and the northern girl had never been close enough for her suspicions to be confirmed.

"Lots of Report footage," Atiena agreed. That cynicism again! "Ms Ndlovukazi won't be joining us?"

"Uzohola is having an evening off." Wick had a low, slightly delighted tone to his voice, which caused Täj to shoot him an amused, slightly withering look. "She deserves it, I think – she's been working all day, every day, since the Selection began."

"Seems like you all have been," Lissa said curiously.

"Nah. Täj's done fuck all. You've done more for the rebellion with your photo-shoots than he has done in the last ten years."

The pale man didn't seem to be able to argue against that, and nor did he get the opportunity, for they were interrupted by the staff entering the room to set down the food for their meal – a strange fusion of cuisines, as all things in this province seemed to be a fusion of some sort or another. Atiena did not seem to be able to hold back from reaching out for the spicy stew, the _feijoada_, and muttered by way of explanation, when she caught Liara watching, "just like Mama Morris used to make it." Yue seemed delighted to tell Lissa what all the different pieces of sushi were called – _hosomaki_, _temaki_, _narezushi_, _temari_, _inari-zushi_, the words dropping from her lips like she was reciting poetry, more confident in sharing this information than Liara had seen her in a long time, maybe ever. Without needing to be asked, Wick passed Saran the communal bowl of _guriltai shul_, from which she spooned great heaps of Mongolian noodles and raw mutton out onto her plate. Liara thought there wasn't enough space on her plate, or in her stomach, for all of the foods she wanted to try – the Kingdom in Exile was a poor one, but in every aspect of life they seemed to pour every inch of their creativity and soul and effort, with the result that the room was suddenly warm and alive with the rich scent of spices.

The door slid open, and Vardi Tayna slid in, her long dark hair in loose damp tendrils about her shoulders. As way of explanation for her lateness, she waved the bottles in her hands, and tossed one to Täj, the other to Liara – a bottle of 25 year Invergordon for Täj, 20 year Samaroli Yehmon for Liara. Their labels were worn, faded as though they had been buried somewhere for a long time and only recently unearthed. "Much negotiation was had," Vardi Tayna said, very dryly. "But what Wick wants, Wick gets."

"Are we celebrating something?" Liara asked. She couldn't say that she got along very well with the rebel girl; Vardi Tayna always seemed vaguely insincere, neither trustworthy nor trusting, and it remained slightly beyond Liara's understanding what the other rebels saw in her to count her so solidly amongst their friends – what Demetri saw in her. Vardi Tayna collapsed into a seat beside Liara, and reached for a glass, and soon each girl had a glass of whiskey or wine or rum in front of them, Saran looking slightly apprehensive at the ease with which Vardi Tayna drained her first glass and poured herself a second.

"Absolutely not," Wick replied. "A sober rebellion is no rebellion at all, you know? We drink to forget. We also drink because, well, it's fun."

The bottle was passed to Liara – the whiskey, the Invergordon. Trajan had sometimes drank the same, when Liara's father had called to his study and the two of them would sit with Set by the fire with tumblers of whisky before them and much to discuss. She and Mordred had got very drunk on the same for her fifteenth birthday, hiding on the Lee household's roof, away from the insipidly tacky party her mother had planned for the occasion. Mordred had nearly fallen over the edge; Liara had threatened to push him. And they had shattered the bottle as well, somewhere between drinking and half-climbing, half-sliding down off the top of the building. She could still remember the pale emerald colour of the glass, the same as the bottle she now held in her hands. She wondered if the General had pilfered some of the bottles from the palace, stealing Trajan's alcohol even as he stole Trajan's son.

"Does anyone know any drinking games?" Wick enquired, once the food was nearly all cleared from the shared dishes. An interesting form of cultural exchange, Liara thought, though perhaps an enlightening one. If you could learn about a person's life succinctly, she thought it likely you did so through food, sex or alcohol. And, well, they had already handled the first and the second seemed... rather off the table for the time being.

Lissa was about to speak when the door to the room slid open for a second time, and - Liara had to set her jaw - Demetri appeared on the threshold, dressed far more formally than any of the people before him, the remnants of a suit that seemed to have been eroded by whatever evening event had similarly left him looking tired, drawn and pale: a faded white shirt, a tie loose around his neck, cuffs rolled up to his elbows. "Would you all hold it against me if I were to interrupt?"

"You've missed the food, your Highness." Wick had stretched out, quite languidly, on his side of the table, hands braced behind his head to look at his king.

"I've already eaten." Demetri sounded amused. Liara could count very few times that he ever sounded otherwise. A wry, light amusement seemed to be his default - perhaps because it was difficult to take offence at. "But I could definitely do with some drinking."

Täj was already pouring him a glass of the rum, so Demetri took a seat between Lissa and Yue, and pushed back his hair, and flashed Atiena a smile when he caught her watching him. Maybe it was the softer light, or the late hour, or the slight haze of incense and whiskey fumes which hung over the whole room, but Liara could not hake the impression that everyone here seemed so much younger than they usually did. Less scarred. Less bitter. Liara, as she always did when she was in close proximity with Demetri, could not resist scanning his features - but the man may as well have been wearing a mask for all that he betrayed.

"So," Wick was saying, "a game? Get to know your king..."

A slight ripple of laughter.

"We could sconce," Liara said, her mouth almost moving of its own accord.

"Sconce?" Saran repeated, looking curious. Täj pressed his lips into a half-smile and Demetri turned his head to say something to the pale man as the rebel began to roll another cigarette.

"It's a game we used to play at the palace."

Demetri's eyes were very green, and very steady.

"You say something that someone might have done, and if you've done it, you have to drink."

She was quickly shushed by Wick's call of "show! Don't tell!"

Liara rolled her eyes. "Fine." She stood, glass in hand, and looked around the room, trying to think of something which might amuse the group, something which might rattle Demetri a little, something which might peel back some layer of his armour. "I sconce anyone who... has broken a bone. Now you stand, and you drink, if you have."

The rebels all stood, and Yue as well, and Atiena and Lissa, and they took a sip - some larger than the others - and then they sat again, and Liara looked expectantly at Lissa to provide the next one.

"I sconce anyone who has..." Lissa paused. "Or _has_ had. A crush on one of the rebels."

Dangerous, Liara thought, because a crush on the rebels was not necessarily a crush on Demetri. But the king looked relaxed and laughed at the sconce, and applauded her bravery as Saran rose, looking shy, and then Yue stood also, and Atiena followed suit, and Lissa pointed at the others and said, "I said _anyone_, not any of the _Selected_," and Täj and Vardi Tayna and Demetri and Wick all stood and raised their glasses towards Lissa and drained their glasses.

No sooner had everyone sat again than Vardi Tayna bounced to her feet, a darkly gleeful look in her eyes. "I sconce anyone..." Her eyes flicked around the room, looking quite dangerous. Wick looked like he wanted to muzzle her. Täj looked like he thought she might tear his whole skeleton from him with a single word. Even Demetri leaned forward and his smile faded from his face. Vardi Tayna seemed to think better of the one she was going to use, and switched tack swiftly. "I sconce anyone who accidentally cracked their cyanide pill when they shouldn't have, and passed out from panic!"

Wick leapt to his feet in protest. "I told you that in _confidence, _VT!"

"There are no secrets in sconces," Liara said, rather sympathetically, and poured more wine in Wick's glass so that the young man could take his assigned drink. "You can only take revenge."

Wick laughed. "I sconce anyone who once forgot what name they were using….." Täj and Vardi Tayna both prepared to stand, but Wick held up a finger. "And got _incredibly_ angry at the guy they were sleeping with for "talking about some other girl"!"

Yue clapped her hands over her mouth in shock, and Liara could not help but burst out laughing, her entire body convulsing. Täj's smile was barely restrained and very white indeed as he tipped the contents of his glass into Vardi Tayna's, and the spy girl stood, made an obscene gesture towards Wick, and drained her glass. When she sat, she put her face very firmly in Täj's shoulder, and it was on the pale man to stroke her hair very gingerly and say, quite sympathetically, "it was very, _very _funny, Tayna."

That seemed to start the flood, for abruptly the accusations were flying and the half-circle which had assembled seemed to have a whole host of scores to settle, though with every call there was a ripple of good-natured laughter and some back-and-forth banter before the penalty was accepted.

"I sconce anyone who convinced an entire Crown regiment that he was Seth Dunin's illegitimate child!"

"I sconce anyone who accidentally shot the General!"

"I sconce anyone who got his ears pierced by a drunk Vardi Tayna and a very dull bayonet!"

"I sconce anyone who replaced his Wanted posters with copies that had a better photo on them!"

Even Saran had joined in. "I sconce anyone who made a child cry by smiling at them!"

At this point, Wickanninish Harjo was getting extremely drunk, for much of the list had been directed at him. "This is starting to feel a little uneven," he complained, but he had a rakish smile on his face and rather seemed to be enjoying the attention. "Well then, I sconce anyone who pretends she can't speak English when she wants to avoid talking to someone."

Saran blushed and rose for her drink.

"While you're standing," Wick added, "I sconce anyone whose family owns most of Mongolia."

Saran again had no choice but to drink.

"And again." Wick's smile was wicked. "I sconce anyone with a Napoleon complex."

"Five foot three," Saran declared. "Is _not short_, and I refuse to drink for that one."

"That sounds like short-man-syndrome to me, Lady Saran."

Saran made a face and took a third drink, throwing Wick a teasingly angry look as she sat. Yue looked like she had been mulling one over, but Saran beat her to it, as she leaned forward and called, "I sconce anyone who has _literally murdered_ people, but thinks that anyone who dislikes dogs is a monster."

Atiena shrugged. "I stand by it," she said, although she seemed unable to hold back a smile in Saran's direction as their gazes met. She rose, and then there was a ripple of laughter as Demetri stood as well.

"Lady Atiena is rarely wrong," he said, and held up a hand. "I remind you, though, it is a crime to sconce your king."

Vardi Tayna shook her head. "Absolutely, your Grace. It would just be a coincidence if one was to apply to you… now, I sconce anyone who tried to claim he'd been shot when really he had just tripped during a battle and fallen on a piece of rusty rebar."

Demetri shook his head. "I was _twelve_."

"You were a fucking idiot, is what you were."

So, of course, he drank.

And then the flurry was turned onto the Selected girls, and it was only in so doing that Liara began to truly understand just how well they had got to know one another over those interminably long days at one another sides.

"I sconce anyone who still thinks sixty degrees is a 'hot day'." That was a dig directed precisely at the northern girls, Saran and Yue, who seemed pretty unapologetic in accepting it, though Saran let out a brief protest of, "it _is" _as she drank and sat again.

"I sconce anyone who started crying after a bee flew into a window." That was from an amused Atiena, directed squarely at Yue, whose blush was almost unnoticeable under the alcohol-induced flush which was beginning to creep up around her cheeks.

"I sconce anyone who, after stabbing someone in the neck, was more concerned with getting blood on their clothes." Liara thought Vardi Tayna sounded almost admiring as Atiena stood to accept that one, and then there was a ripple of laughter as Täj leapt up to join her.

"I sconce anyone who thought an air raid would make an amazing first date for a girl he had never spoken to before." Only Wick would have gotten away with that one, for it was directed at Demetri, who seemed to take it in good humour as he stood, drank, and said, "I haven't heard any complaints," and Liara quelled the little voice in her head that asked why she had been accorded five minutes in a supervised room while Nina got a roadtrip. Though the rebels had drank the most of any of the group, they seemed the least affected; Liara supposed a life as hard as theirs tended to breed a tolerance for alcohol.

"I sconce anyone who has run away to try and join the circus." From a languid Saran, for an amped-up Lissa, and though Liara had not heard this particular story before, she couldn't say it surprised her in the least about the slightly wild orphan. She was a strong drinker, almost as steady as Wick with the tenacity with which she flicked back her glass of rum.

"I sconce anyone who started collecting teeth after fights." Vardi Tayna seemed unapologetic standing up to accept that one from her unlikely roommate, Yue, who giggled through most of her words, and from the laughs of Wick and Demetri, this was a story that they had heard before.

Saran, looking curious, leaned forward and said, "I sconce anyone who's hooked up with someone else here."

"Define hooked up," Vardi Tayna began, but Täj shook his head, and said, "if you have to _ask_, darling..."

They clinked their glasses, and drained them in a single swig. The rest of the Inner Circle looked utterly unsurprised at this revelation, but some of the Selection exchanged shocked looks. Yue looking thoughtful. Wick took a more muted sip of his drink. Demetri did not drink, and Liara could not hope to say why that relieved her so much. Nor could she quite articulate why it so disappointed her that Täj had.

Demetri spoke next, his voice very thoughtful, and very soft. "I sconce any member of the Selected who is _actually_ in this for love."

Yue rose. Then Saran. And Liara, almost without realising it, stood as well. Well, she thought. For a certain sort of love.

Could you call it love?

"_For _love implies that I didn't love you long before that, darling," Vardi Tayna was saying to the king, as though trying to lighten the somber mood which had descended upon the asking of this question. "Should I stand?"

Demetri grimaced. "I would rather you didn't."

"Hey!" She elbowed him, and he took her empty glass from her and refilled it, and it did not escape Liara's notice that she pointedly did not take a drink.

Well. That was that answered.

"The world," Yue said softly, "is starting to spin a little."

Atiena leaned forward to pour her a little more wine. "That means it's working."

* * *

After fifteen years of marriage, Lord Set Dunin still sometimes found himself utterly dumbfounded at the sheer otherworldly beauty of the woman he had the honour to call his wife. It was the sort of feeling one expected to fade, not intensify, after so long together, but occasionally – as today – he caught sight of Ysabel in a sort of living candid, clearly oblivious to being observed, and in that carelessness a pure, unfiltered sort of beauty, not merely physical but in the way her pale eyes moved, the way she smiled a little crookedly to show cuspids that were slightly too sharp, the way she tilted her head when confronted with someone or something she clearly believed to be insipid beyond belief – indeed, most people and most things she encountered.

And as much as he continued to treasure the same, he had learned to treasure also those rare moments over the past fifteen years when she had seemed at rest and at ease – rare before and even rarer now, with Mordred stalking the halls in thinly veiled brooding bitterness and General Lee prepared to launch fresh air raids at the slightest twitch of Set's finger, even after their last two had killed thirty people in all, General Lee's daughter reportedly amongst them. Every vein and artery of the palace seemed to thrum with tension. So it was very rare that Set might enter the drawing room to find Ysabel had managed to steal a few moments of sleep on the chaise lounge at the far end of the room. Even asleep, she managed to look slightly stressed; there were thin lines beside her eyes that Set thought might never fade, like even lost in dreams she was aware of the weight of the kingdom on her shoulders.

Her eyelids fluttered slightly as Set lowered himself down on one knee beside her, but Set put a hand on her hair and said, softly, "don't worry, lovely, it's just me." He kept his voice very low, more a suggestion of sound.

"Mmm." She stirred, turning her head, her hair splayed wildly around her on the pale gold brocade pillow under her head. "What time is it?"

"About seven. Mrs Kucek is going to bring you up dinner shortly." Set paused, gently stroking her hair, and decided against asking her how her day had been, knowing the answer would simply be, _stressful_. Fighting a war was hardly a relaxing endeavour, Set knew from experience, and Set knew that Ysabel had spent most of the early morning fielding antagonistic questions from international agencies and foreign diplomats about a supposed massacre in one of the northern rebel provinces. He doubted highly that her day had been very enjoyable, and he therefore decided that perhaps he should distract her by speaking about his own. He kept his voice light. "Mrs Lahela sends her regards."

Ysabel, her eyes still shut, smiled slightly. "Thank you for taking that particular bullet, darling."

"She's worried about her daughter. It's understandable." Set was not accustomed to taking the tactful role; he was usually the military commander, charged with planning attacks and leading attacks, minutely more suited to violence than to diplomacy.

"Her daughter made a choice." Even half-asleep, Ysabel could be very cold when she wanted to be. "My son didn't."

Set didn't see fit to mention that Demetri had been Jael's son, not Ysabel's. Mordred and Demetri were brothers, and Ysabel had pledged from the first to allow no different treatment between them. Whatever failures in that vein that she had made had to be forgivable; she had always tried her best. Set could remember her confiding in him, the night before her marriage to Trajan – "all the stories, all the wicked stepmothers…"

"You? Wicked?" Set had put his arm around her and drawn her close. "Not a strong enough word for how awful you are." But that had, at least, made her laugh, rather than cry, and Set had always loved to hear Ysabel laugh, even in those old days when she was his brother's wife, successor to Jael, new queen-in-the-making.

She was not laughing now, but he thought that was probably because the topic had turned, however briefly, to Demetri, and unlike Mordred, who had a gallows sense of humour, or Set, who could be extraordinarily incisive when he wanted to be, Ysabel still rather treated the topic of the lost prince as a kind of taboo that could not be treated with anything less than total reverence. "And General Lee?"

"Is he ever any different?"

"True." She turned her head into his hand, and smiled sleepily. "I should be working. The Selection won't organise itself."

"A few hours of rest might help, not hurt."

"Maybe." She put her hands over her eyes and yawned. One would be forgiven for thinking she looked far from queenly right now, and yet Set found himself, as ever, quite entranced. "Poor Mordred."

"He's about to spend the foreseeable with thirty five pretty girls." Set laced his fingers through his wife's, and gently tugged them from her face; she had to laugh. "Poor Mordred seems like an overstatement."

Ysabel laughed. "Set, you of all people should know that thirty five beautiful women means nothing if one particular person isn't among them."

Set laughed under his breath. "You're starting to sound sentimental in your old age, Ysa."

"God forbid." Ysabel shook her head and sighed. "You know, I had the most wonderful dream."

Set raised her hand to his lips, and smiled against her skin. "Oh?"

Ysabel sounded very, very far away. "I dreamed the Selection was over, and it was Mordred's wedding, and he had found the most perfect woman to call his queen, with Liara as his maid of honour, and she was alive, and she was content, and it was all so wonderful, but we were waiting. I can't remember why we were waiting. Waiting for the bride? And I turned around to speak to his best man, to ask where she had got to, and it was Demetri, happy and whole and home."

Set spoke softly. "Maybe it was prophetic."

Ysabel's voice sounded like it was coming from very far-away. "We can dream, can't we?"

They could, Set thought. Dreaming was the only thing left to them, really.


	16. All Earth Was But One Thought

**Chapter Fifteen: All Earth Was But One Thought**

* * *

… _and look'd up with mad disquietude on the dull sky, the pall of a past world; and then again  
__With curses cast them down upon the dust, and gnash'd their teeth and howl'd._

\- Lord Byron

* * *

There were tunnels under the safehouse. Marjorie had not found them on purpose, but there was no denying that they were there now that she had seen them – narrow dark hallways unfurling like spilled ink beneath the ordinary facade of the abandoned hotel, lit only by the residual light soaking through the crack under the door behind her, leaving the farther reaches of the corridors doused entirely in shadows and shade. She slid one foot forward, to test the curvature of the landscape, and found that there was a step just before her, only a small one, and that the hallway that continued was very gently sloped downwards, into the bowels of the foundation under the building.

A small voice in the smallest crevice of her skull whispered that in the Selection, in the rebellion, in this world, you were always being watched. Was this a test? Or was this, she thought, her fingers already itching for a pen, an exclusive? Marjorie knew that she could be headstrong, but so too could she recognise the line between being such and being stubbornly stupid. So although her nerves thrummed with the desire to stem forward and search further, she forced herself to step backwards, back out into the light and space of the corridor above, and to close the secret door as securely as she could, hoping against hope that no alarm had been triggered in whatever distant office from which Thiago Wesick pulled the threads of his vast spiderweb conspiracy. Or perhaps there were cameras. But she couldn't be blamed for just stumbling on something, and leaving it be, could she?

Provided she did leave it be, of course.

But even as she walked away, Marjorie knew that she would not be gone for long.

All tunnels led somewhere.

That evening, at dinner, Thiago was, as ever, absent, and the other rebels subdued. Anzu, the commander with the shaved shaved head and massive burns on the left side of her face, slumped in her chair with one leg propped on the lip of her seat, her arms resting on her knees, looking mutinous at the prospect of eating. Phineas and Mikhail, the bleach-blonde twins roughly as tall and broad as a barge, distinguished only by Phineas' missing forearm and Mikhail's white-bandage eyepatch, spoke quietly in the harsh tongue that Marjorie now recognised as Belarusian – though the rebels had taught her a little of the language during their journey, she could distinguish only a few words from the chaos of casual speech: _pachavannie, vybar, zdradnik_. She could translate none but the last. _Traitor. _She didn't dare to ask who they were talking about, although her gaze did wander to her fellow Selected.

Over the last few days, Corvina had withdrawn further into herself, and now anytime Marjorie looked at her the other girl seemed to fairly vibrate with repressed bitterness. Their train journey north had ended early, and they had spent the last few days in near-constant transit here-and-there at the whim of the spymaster, so detached from the other girls in the Selection that a small part of Marjorie wondered if they had been eliminated, that the news just hadn't reached them yet. She didn't like to allow those kinds of thoughts to creep forward – it would help no one, and she had barely seen anything of Demetri, the king of ashes, to make this whole venture worthwhile even in the most abstract sense.

So it was no surprise that Cor was stabbing at her food with a tin fork, her eyes dark with thought, and for not the first time Marjorie wondered what Thiago had said to her on that train journey to make such a long contemplation necessary. Cor had worked as a waitress in some seedy restaurant in a rebel province, Marjorie knew that much, and wondered whether the other Selected girl was being somehow blackmailed. In war, criminal enterprises tended to erupt from the earth like weeds to take over those functions that the government could not – or would not – provide, and she had gleaned enough from the quiet talk of Anzu and the twins to understand that the Kingdom in Exile was, in a sense, fighting a war on two fronts: ahead of them, the Crown and all its amassed forces and wealth, a juggernaut brought to bear on a few scrappy idealists with old shotguns and blood on their faces; behind them, the petty gangs that had crept from the shadows to offer food and safety and transport to those traumatised citizens that all war, no matter how well-intended, left in its wake.

Could you even call this a well-intended war anymore? Did the ordinary person care who was king? Or did they care that rebel vehicles careened through their villages, that bombs tore their homes to shreds, that their sons and daughters were thrown beneath the enormous turning wheels of slaughter to carry Demetri closer to Angeles and to the throne?

At this point, Marjorie thought she could think, or write, no further on the topic. It would only depress her.

She needed something real to sink her teeth into, not merely empty thoughts of how futile it all was. She often wondered why it was that she and Corvina had been the two separated out to travel with the spymaster – when he was around, of course. Were they intended to be of use to him? Or was it just to keep an eye on them? Surely they might deem Eden or Liara more deserving of this sort of scrutiny.

Well, Marjorie was about to prove them right, for over their shared meal, she caught Cor's eye with a raised eyebrow and inclined her head to indicate that they might speak later, and the Sonage girl was astute enough to understand all that it was meant to convey, for she nodded and looked back down to her food, and Marjorie, gratified, turned to Phineas to try and strike up a conversation – for, after all, if she was not permitted to be near the king, she may and well learn what she could about the people who had volunteered to die for him.

Cor was waiting for her as the girls left the small lounge they had appropriated as a dining hall – they were accorded more-or-less free range over the hotel, though when the thought had occurred to Marjorie that they might try and venture further, she had been able to see clearly that Phineas and Mikhail were pacing the perimeter of the grounds, guns slung around their shoulders, and thought better of trying to persuade them they should be allowed to wander into Sonage. Indeed the twins retreated to their patrol, and Anzu, with a shake of her head, rubbing her hand over her burns, indicated that she was going to go and watch the Report in the honeymoon suite that she had taken as her own upon their arrival three days ago. Cor and Marjorie kept their heads down and discussed the latest episode of _Diadem_ as they made their way through the hallways to the service elevator which led down into the kitchens, and then looped their way around and down towards what might have once been a wine cellar, now all hollowed out and empty for storage of emergency supplies for the rebels and their followers. Marjorie demonstrated how she had found the hidden door, and how one of the high wine racks could be pulled from the wall to allow entrance into the tunnels, which were no brighter now than before.

Cor said, quite admiringly, "were you looking for it?"

"Me? No."

The waitress's eyes flickered with suspicion. "You've done a lot of exploring, Vermudez."

Marjorie gazed down into the tunnels. "I guess," she replied softly, that same instinct which had told her to return also telling her that sharing too much with Corvina Rouen could not possibly be a good idea. Despite their long hours at one another's side, she could not say that they had bonded unduly; Marjorie had always been closer to Soledad, Corvina to the northern array of girls that she had arranged around her like a queen holding court, and they had done very little to endear themselves to one another in the days since.

There was a brief silence. And then, Marjorie said, "do you have a light?" and the girls cast about in the room until they found a headlamp stored amongst the emergency munitions, and with that in hand like a lucky charm, its wan light illuminating sharply the curved walls of the tunnel and emphasising the eerie, distorted shadows of the girls, they moved down into the tunnels, Marjorie directing the beam at the ground to ensure that they did not abruptly pitch into nothingness where the path ended.

The tunnel sloped downwards, and then very gradually turned into a corkscrew spiral, and narrowed to the point that Marjorie had to walk in front of Cor, her shoulders brushing either side of the wall. And then the path straightened, and the ground levelled off, and Marjorie could pay more attention to the construction of the tunnel, to see that it was not mere hewn earth as she had expected, but carved from red brick like an English university, the ceiling rounded and the floor made of concrete. And then, yes, the tunnel opened up slightly, just enough that Cor could walk beside Marjorie, and Marjorie realised how deeply into the earth they seemed to have gone – were they twenty feet down? - and in the same realisation noted that they had stepped into a corridor, dark and doused in gloom, but a corridor nonetheless.

The first thing that struck Marjorie was the low height of the ceiling, about half that of the floors above, and she was abruptly very glad that neither she nor Cor were all that tall. The floor was dimly-lit and bunker-like, but she was growing to realise that in shape and structure it was identical to the hallways that they had left behind in the world above, just like a normal hotel bedroom corridor, doors and hallways branching off on either side. Stepping forward, she tested the handle on the first room they came to, and found it locked; she shone the light on the door and found that, though it had a plaque on which a room number might usually be etched, it was utterly blank.

Ahead of her, the waitress keeping her voice soft, Cor said, "this one's open", and Marjorie followed her to the indicated room. There was a pair of shoes left outside – Marjorie couldn't say why that bothered her so much but there they were, a pair of brogues, etched with deep serrations in the brown leather, a little scuffed at the toe and heel, well-worn and yet well-cared for, the burnish of polish still apparent – but the room itself was empty. Empty, but not bare; it was, Marjorie saw, decorated with a single low table and a chair on either side, and files piled on the floor in the corner. Cor said, "should we…?" and Marjorie didn't have an answer, for although the curiosity in her itched for her to step forward and inspect the files, she could not shake the overwhelming urge to run, to get back outside, to see the sky again and not risk getting caught in this strange place by Thiago or Anzu or whoever it was had carved out this space below the world.

Cor said, her voice stubborn, "hand me the light", so Marjorie did, and stepped back, and let the Sonage girl enter the odd room and approach the files. As the illumination accorded by the headlamp faded into the confinement of the room, Marjorie was surprised to realise that the hallway was not immediately returned to total darkness – no, there was a low glow emanating from another room, even further down the corridor, so as Cor pulled the first file open, Marjorie stepped down the hall and glanced into this second room, aglow with pale blue light. Within, she could see that it was a room utterly gutted of all furniture but for a single TV screen, showing the interior of an empty bedroom, and a low chair in front of it. Marjorie thought she might have understood if there was a wall of TV screens, or a changing perspective – the Selected girls had all assumed they were under constant surveillance – but this was just one, a fixation, a watchfulness on a single room that unnerved her more than she could say.

On the television screen, the duvet on the bed shifted, and she realised that it was not an empty room, but that there was a body lying under the sheets, moving slowly, lethargically, like an animal with a head wound.

"Who is that?" Cor's voice, so suddenly at her shoulder, nearly made Marjorie leap from her skin, and she swallowed back an instinctive sound of surprise. Cor's gaze was fixated on the screen; it was impossible to tell whether the figure under the covers was male, female, adult or child, any distinguishing features but for how slowly they moved, how tired they seemed. It felt voyeuristic even to be in the same room as the screen, so Marjorie backed out, and after a moment, Cor followed, and they advanced further down the corridor.

"What do you think they're for?" It felt wrong to speak, even softly, but Marjorie just couldn't hold the question back. "All these rooms."

Cor stared at Marjorie, like she thought the other girl was an idiot. She had dead eyes, did Corvina Rouen, like the eyes of a shark. "Isn't it obvious?"

Was it?

Marjorie didn't want to admit that she thought it might be.

They continued a little further, finding all the next rooms to be locked, the walls of the hallway bare, the ceiling remaining stubbornly low, and then they turned a corner and found another long corridor stretching with the same array of locked rooms, stretching as far as the lamp's illumination stretched. Almost as though in unspoken agreement, Cor and Marjorie both stopped. It was so quiet that she could hear her own heartbeat, and then….

Cor's voice was soft. "Can you hear that?"

There was someone screaming in one of the rooms ahead. It was guttural, that scream, wrenched from somewhere deep inside, and as soon as Marjorie heard it, she wished that she never had.

"We should go," Cor said softly, and for perhaps the first time in her life, Marjorie found it very hard to argue.

* * *

If there was one thing for which Liz had grown grateful over the course of this Selection, it was the quiet bond that seemed to have grown between the group that Uzokuwa, Uzohola's twin brother, liked to call the bunker girls. It was not so overt as the friendship between the northern girls had seemed, apparent and immediate, but it was a gentle familiarity that Liz did not think she could afford to discount – a growing knowledge of one another, the wisdom that Opal was best left alone in the mornings until she had been allowed access to the finite store of coffee that Demetri had sent to her after the funeral with a small note attached (_let's not test that record – D_), that Nina's barbed words were rarely meant to wound but to amuse and that if any feelings were hurt she would take no offence at being told so, that Soledad would pace in the middle of the night if she could not sleep, her shadow stretching wide across the walls of the bunker in which the girls stayed. Sometimes Liz wondered what they had learned about her, these strange fate-wrenched companions, and every small concession they made to her quirks made her feel a little less uncertain about the world around her. She wasn't sure she wanted to care about these people, but they seemed determined to worm their way in beyond her walls.

Today, for example, she walked into the communications hub to find that Nina had managed to finagle a packet of Oreos from Uzokuwa at some point in the early evening, and set it beside the chair that was usually Liz's. Such a small gesture, Liz thought, and yet the thoughtfulness that it showed – the time and effort that the mining girl had put into such a tiny token of friendship and familiarity – rather made Liz want to smile, as she went to the chair and sat down and said to Sol, who was lowering herself to her usual position on the ground, cross-legged, "how was today?"

The young lawyer rolled her eyes, and caught the pillow that Opal threw in her direction as the girl from Hansport entered the room as well. "I think I pulled a muscle in my face."

"_Smile_," Nina said, in a pitch-perfect imitation of handsome Farid, the caramel-voiced second-unit director of propaganda, one of the two Voices of Illéa who narrated each rebel broadcast. "_Now look concerned. Now, smile…._" Opal laughed, the sound bright and sudden and very rare, and went to the television set to switch it on. The military compound was a sparse, bare, cold space, and after so long there without even the prospect of the king to keep them on their toes, the girls had grown accustomed to grasping at whatever amusements they could find. Liz was used to the constant motion and business of life on the farm, not this sterile serenity, like they were expected to go into comas for the duration of the Selection and awaken only when Demetri was around. This evening, that meant – as on every Friday evening – the weekly rebel Report, a pale facsimile of that issued by the Crown and yet somehow endearing in its simplicity. Their one link to the outside world, the bunker girls had grown almost accustomed to maintaining a running commentary on the rare glimpse of another member of the Selected, be it Saran Altai looking magnanimous as she read to orphans or Eden Lahela adopting an expression of benign surprise as she was shown the wheat harvests to the south.

The funeral to which the bunker girls had been ferried last week had not made any appearance in the propaganda. Liz had to wonder at that – to wonder what the point had been in bringing the Selected girls along, if they were not going to be used in a constructive manner. Was Demetri just attempting to insinuate them, bit by bit, into the world of the rebellion? To include them in all of the crying and bleeding and grieving? To indoctrinate them into the business of dying and the art of mourning?

Didn't he know Liz was well-practised at all of this by now?

"It's starting," Sol said softly, and Liz focused on the screen as the emblem of the rebellion filled the screen on a background of deep maroon, accompanied not by a flourish as on the Crown's Report, but in utter silence. They were workman-like, these Reports, made not with skill but with a kind of earnestness that betrayed the true nature of this motley rebellion - led by some rebel commander or another, men so poorly educated they could barely read their own newly penned constitution, women more accustomed to the weight of a gun in their arms than the weight of fiscal responsibility on their shoulders, only Enyakatho the propaganda director with any true skill at filmmaking. Even Wick, who was popularly known as the propagandist, was not imbued with any great talent at the same; it was a natural likeability that allowed him to appeal to the same people who had put him on death row in Angeles all those years ago, an innate knowledge of how to endear oneself to those around him, as easy as breathing. There was a reason, Liz thought, that he had been made Administer for Social Matters, rather than for Propaganda. He was not a hero to the people because he had appeared in film reels; he was a hero to the people because they had seen him dig bodies out of wreckage with his bare hands, serve soup to orphans and widows, carry injured soldiers out battlefields with his own life at great risk. That was what the Report relied on these days – not the _Axiom_'s talented way of wielding the truth like a scalpel, excising all that was unfavourable until only the beneficial remained, but showing the rebels at their best and hoping no one dared to ask what was happening in the background.

The seal faded and was replaced with a single static shot of a small coastal town, the coast buffeted by towering waves fretted with white foam, seagulls wheeling low over a wooden pier, a lighthouse over it all scanning left and then right with a beautiful long golden beam of light. The only sound was the shriek of a coastal osprey, somewhere behind the camera, and the swell of the sea, and the image remained on the screen for a long moment, the undulation of the ocean almost hypnotic. Then it cut to an interior view of a small laundromat, washing machines rattling with movement, and Opal rolled her eyes as Farid's voice poured through the speakers, "_for this week's feature… we speak tonight of roots_."

Another cut, away from Hansport, into the interior of a library, still but for the sound of footsteps somewhere to the right, books filling the screen, high and low. Then, movement in the right corner of the screen – a cat creeping along the top of the stacks, striped orange and white like a diminutive tiger. "_Of genesis,_" Farid added. His voice had such soothing tone, like he was enjoying every word he spoke, tenor and smooth, like pouring caramel. It reminded one of the radio announcers from very old programs, like he had stolen his accent from some hapless commentator several decades ago.

Sol visibly cringed as her own voice replaced his, clearly speaking as she had been directed to so speak: "_for as long as I can remember, I've wanted to fight for justice_."

"My _hero_," Nina said mockingly, clutching at her heart, and Sol lobbed an Oreo in her direction; the miner girl caught it between her teeth, her smile wickedly roguish, and Liz almost smiled as the screen changed once more to a wide field of snow and Saran Altai's voice, again sounding uncannily directed: "_coming to Illéa was meant to be a fresh start, but I didn't find the land I loved until we were liberated._"

They could only film these sorts of gentler pieces in rebel-occupied territories, so Liz didn't expect to ever see her hometown or hear her family featured on them. That would be too dangerous – it was so much easier to just set up in Whites and interview the Yukimuras for the thousandth time that month about how proud they were of their rebel daughter in the rebel Selection. Sol was a favourite for these sorts of pieces; she was well-spoken and well-educated, confident and yet not brash, her family full of professionals who supported the rebellion whole-heartedly without ever having to stain their hands with the blood of those who thought otherwise.

Not like Liz's.

But Liz couldn't allow herself to become bitter. She just settled back in her chair to watch, to keep an eye out for the king, and to entertain herself with what little amusement they had been accorded today.

If there wasn't some change soon, she thought, the black widow queen wouldn't even have to do anything. They would die of boredom.

* * *

When Atiena reached Raphael's house again, waved off at the gate by a glowering Vardi Tayna who disappeared back along the street as soon as the rebel girl had stepped into the courtyard, she was surprised to see that, although Uzohola Ndlovukazi was meant to be on her day off, the young rebel was sitting on the porch by the backdoor of the Smetisko household, their nameless dog resting its head quite contentedly in her lap, kicking a little as though even in dream it felt it had to remain in motion. Atiena had always loved animals, and stayed with Agares and Raphael had only reminded her more powerfully of how much she missed Midnight, the lame stray that she and the man she called Killmonger had taken in all those years ago.

She wondered which name Uzohola used for the dog. Did it matter? Was she allowed to name him what she would, or was that reserved for special people? Not to say Uzohola wasn't special. She was in the inner circle. She was probably very special. Not to say Atiena thought she was special. Or that Atiena necessarily thought she _wasn't _special.

Yes.

Atiena was starting to think all of that alcohol had affected her a little more than she had thought that it would. She didn't usually drink at home, in Tammins. She was too focused for drinking. She didn't have time for partying.

She was starting to think she had overdone it a little bit.

"Lady Atiena." Uzohola's voice was very low, slightly raspy, like she had worn it out. Atiena couldn't imagine her shouting. Maybe she had been singing? What did rebels do on their nights off? The Morrises never had nights off. They were rebels without a rebellion, resisting without a resistance, insurgents without comrades at their back. They were always _on_. Atiena hadn't realised until she joined the Selection just how exhausted it all had left her, and when she thought of her family, she thought of how sad it was that she had left them behind to deal with all of that, without her there to guide them.

This was for the greater good, she always thought to herself, and could never quite bring herself to believe such a clear lie.

Wait. Uzohola had spoken to her. Hadn't she? Had Atiena replied? Should she?

"Uzohola," Atiena replied. She was gratified to see that she was not swaying. Saran had been swaying when they left the restaurant, just a little – she had nearly tripped on nothing, and done a funny little skip-and-a-hop to save her balance, and declared what a triumph that had been, which made Yue laugh, because Yue was laughing at most things by that point.

Atiena was starting to like these girls, but she was also thinking that they were, as Vardi Tayna might have said, _fucking idiots_. So they might suit Demetri alright, she thought, birds of a feather and all that.

Was that a phrase? It was, wasn't it?

Uzohola reached behind herself, and then reached her hand out to Atiena. She handed her a letter. An envelope, but Atiena was pretty sure there was a letter _inside _that. Was there? She looked down at it. Yes, a letter – on the front, in slightly shaky writing, ATIEИA MORRIS.

She hadn't been expecting someone as collected as Uzohola Ndlovukazi to have such childish lettering, truth be told. Not that she was judging. Atiena had left school at five, and returned to formal education only briefly. With Veronica.

But Atiena didn't think about Veronica anymore. She didn't let herself. She didn't see the point. Dead girls didn't deserve to live rent-free in her head like that.

She turned the letter over in her hand. She was glad she had been able to read her own name on the front, because the letters were wavering considerably. She had to shut one eye to be able to parse the words.

"This," Uzohola said, a little redundantly. "Is for you."

Atiena blinked. "Ah. You could just. Say it to me. You don't have to send me." She paused. "A letter."

Uzohola shook her head. She had such lovely hair, Atiena thought distantly, all dark and corkscrew curls, but here and there a single golden or red hair glinting from her afro like she had studded her hair with stars when no one was looking. "Uzokuwa gave me this for you," she said patiently. Uzokuwa was her brother, Atiena knew, one of the commanders. Her twin brother, identical twin brother, which wasn't something Atiena really understood because identical twins had to be the same, didn't they, boy and boy and girl and girl. Or maybe they didn't. She couldn't say she was an expert on these things.

"Oh." Uzokuwa was nice, Atiena thought, nice but… not her sort, and she found herself wondering how she would let him down gently. He shouldn't have been sending her letters anyway. She was in the Selection, wasn't she. "Oh. Well."

Uzohola seemed to be delighted with just how slow and thick the drink seemed to have made the Selected girl. "It's not _from_ my brother, Lady Atiena."

"Huuzitfrumden?"

"Do you want to sit down, Lady Atiena?"

She did. She was glad Uzohola had offered. Otherwise she might have started swaying, like Saran had started swaying, and that would have made her seem drunk. And she wasn't drunk. So she sat down. "Who's it from, then?"

Uzohola smiled. "I'm told it was mostly written by a swift and by a mouse."

Atiena couldn't hold back her smile. "The twins?" Like Atiena, they had been adopted by Killmonger, plucked from the desolation of a refugee camp just outside Tammins – Swift was quick and exuberant and knew his way around the city like he had a map printed on the back of his eyelids, and Mouse was quiet and shy and knew how to become invisible when he wanted to be. She could picture them before her now, distinguishable to strangers only by the length of their hair (Swift wore his to his collar; Mouse kept his cropped short), but so clearly different to Atiena's eyes that she still wasn't sure how the rest of the world could be so blind.

"The twins," Uzohola confirmed, and then laughed as Atiena flipped the envelope over and began to contend with opening it, her fingers clumsy and her eyes moreso, unwilling to co-operate and focus so that she could read the words her little brothers had so carefully written and sent half-way across the country with a stranger. "If you're having difficulty reading it..."

"I'm not!" Atiena knew she shouldn't interrupt the co-ordinator. But it was important to say. She wasn't having any difficulty. She wasn't drunk.

"I was going to say I would read it to you."

Atiena relented. "Would you?"

"Of course. Unless you think there'll be anything in here that I shouldn't read?"

Atiena paused. Hesitated. "No." She blinked. "It should be fine."

"Wonderful." Uzohola had one of the brightest smiles Atiena had ever seen, more radiant even than Demetri's, which was apparently famed for its contagiousness. Uzohola single-handedly lit up the night with that expression. She gently took the letter from Atiena – the Morris girl relinquished it without complaint – and the nameless dog crept closer as though in anticipation of a bedtime story as Uzohola began, "_to the best sister in the world..._"

* * *

Sol was a little surprised to find herself cornered as she left the dining hall that evening. They always ate dinner after the Report, with some wine if Farid felt like humouring them, and after so many Fridays that passed in this pattern, they even had an arranged seating pattern – Opal and Nina shoulder-to-shoulder opposite Liz and Sol, at a small square table large enough only for the four of them. Their guards would have eaten earlier in the day in anticipation of the night's watch, but they could sometimes be tempted to join the girls for a little bit of wine and friendly banter back-and-forth, affable enough to be inoffensive, inoffensive enough to slip by the rules of the Selection without causing outrage.

Uzokuwa was ostensibly the commander of the small garrison stationed at the compound, but he was often gone, travelling in the name of the Kingdom here and there. Sol could not guess at what he did when he was gone, only that the last few times he had returned he stank of gunpowder and spoke dourly to the other guards of ambushes on the northern front. Last Sol had heard, he was gone to Tammins to try and recruit some of the independent militias which had sprung up in the power vacuum in the wastes - that was why it came as such a surprise for Sol that he appeared beside her as she walked back towards the bunker, took her by the elbow, and with a softly uttered apology, steered her to a more discreet corridor of the communications hub, leaving behind the other girls. Liz threw Sol a concerned look over her shoulder; Sol knew that the farmer girl had always been closer to Lissa, the wild blonde girl from Angeles, but in the time they had spent together, Liz had slowly grown into something of an older sister for the bunker girls. Sol found it almost amusing, given that Sol herself was two years older, but right now she wouldn't have refused having Liz's passionate stubbornness at her side as her advocate as she and Uzokuwa stopped in the hallway and were joined by Farid, the olive-skinned Voice of Illéa who had narrated the evening's Report.

"I am sorry to break the news to you like this," Uzokuwa said. His voice was low. Field Marshal Uzokuwa was broad-faced and affable, his head clean-shaven and a thick beard covering most of a large, twisted scar along his jawline, dark-skinned like his twin sister, the colour burnished even darker by the long hours he spent in the sun in the Wastelands and in the warzones. He had a low, baritone voice, one that could make anything sound soothing, and yet at his words Sol felt her hands start to shake a little bit. She focused on steadying them before she spoke.

"Has something happened?" It had to be her family, it had to be – if it was anything to do with the broader Selection, surely they would not have separated them like this, taken her away to be spoken to separately. Her family – had something happened to Arlo? He was only eighteen and yet shy, creative, the dreamy sort, unwilling to join the revolution even when all of his childhood friends fled south and north to give their lives to one army or another. Or was it her _mémé_ Alicia? She was only sixty-five, and healthy, or at least, she had been when Sol had joined the Selection. Or was it her _papá_, her _maman_, one of her friends at home in Honduragua? "Is everything okay? My family..."

Uzokuwa shook his head. "Your family is safe, and send you their best wishes. In that regard, you have nothing to worry about."

"But I do have _something_ to worry about?"

Uzokuwa glanced at Farid, who stepped forward to take Sol's hand – an old-fashioned gesture, designed to soothe, and yet Sol still didn't know for what she was being consoled. "Soledad. I am very sorry that we must break this news to you. But His Majesty, the King in Exile, has decided that your time in this Selection has come to an end. He thanks you for your time, your company and your service..."

Sol yanked her hand back. "What?"

"I am," Farid said again. "Very sorry that I must break this news to you."

The hallway they were standing in was narrow, all concrete and brick walls. The only sound was a faltering air-conditioner, somewhere further along the corridor, sputtering and coughing exhaust as it struggled to keep the heat at bay. Sol stared at Farid and, finding that he would not meet her eyes, turned to look at Uzokuwa as well. The Field Marshal was less shy, and met her gaze levelly; there was some sympathy there, but no apology. And why would there be? She was one of thirty four to be got rid of, an obstacle to finding their queen, a distraction from their business of waging war. Or at least, she had been. She wondered if Uzokuwa had been responsible for delivering this news to the other girls – to Ekaitza, to Irri, to Evangeline, to all those girls eliminated en masse on the first night.

"No." Sol's voice was firm, but very soft. "I thank you for your time, gentlemen, but if his Majesty wants to eliminate me, he can tell me himself."

The two commanders exchanged looks. "Ms Delrío," Uzokuwa said. No _Lady_, then. Sol set her jaw. "I don't think you understand. The elimination has been made. We are merely here to notify you."

"As I said. The king can notify me himself."

"The king is occupied."

Sol thought she was at risk of breaking teeth if she tightened her jaw any further. The king was occupied? He had kept them here for _weeks_, without any indication of how the Selection was continuing apace, had failed to even acknowledge her at the funeral, and now he eliminated her from afar with only a courtesy visit from his grunts? "I suggest he makes time."

There was silence. Sol's hands were shaking a little again, but from frustration rather than anything else. Had the king paid no attention to her words, all those days ago? _You've met a handful of us, and you've eliminated so many others, and then you have dates with us one after another, like clockwork, like we're a chore.__ It's not fair._ Was this how he had decided to be fair to them, but not even taking them on dates, by eliminating them as the whim took him? There was whispers that this whole endeavour was just a fiction created to legitimise Vardi Tayna, to make it seem like the General's daughter had been made to fight for her position ("for Demetri's love," Opal had said, but even she had been unable to keep a straight face at the clear lie), to give her some thin veneer of respectability amongst those supporters of the rebellion who still believed in the old traditions, in the Selection, in the Daughters of Illéa.

Farid's brow furrowed, but Uzokuwa seemed almost pleased with Sol's outburst. "Your suggestion shall be taken under counsel, Ms Delrío."

"I won't leave," Sol said, knowing that she was pushing a line here, that she might be stepping over some threshold she couldn't quite recognise and yet quite unable to stop herself. "Until His Majesty gives me an explanation."

"He is a busy man." Uzokuwa's dark eyes seemed to be providing her with a challenge.

"I have faith in the ability of our beloved king to attend the needs of his subjects," Sol said, and thought that Farid's cough that followed might have been to cover up a chuckle.

"In his wisdom, I believe he ought to be able." Uzokuwa inclined his head. "Ms Delrío. I shall do my utmost to arrange the same – and the Kingdom in Exile welcomes you to enjoy our hospitality until we have heard back from King Demetri. But you _have _been eliminated. Anything that follows is a mere… courtesy."

"I understand totally," Sol lied.

* * *

"Shhhh, shh, shhh, shhh…." The world was spinning around Yue a little. "Oh, I'm so sorry. I think I'm a little tipsy."

She was set back on her feet, and the king smiled. "I think you might be."

This was her room, the one she shared with Vardi Tayna. Pretty Vardi Tayna, unfriendly Vardi Tayna. Yue sat down on her bed, very hard, and focused on not throwing up. She had thrown up after breakfast, and after lunch, but she didn't want Demetri to know that. She didn't want him to see her get sick. She focused very carefully on taking off her shoes.

Demetri was by the window, looking at the sketches Yue had pinned to the wall. Oh no, Yue thought. Her sketches.

"No," she protested, leaping back to her feet. "Don't look at my drawings, please don't look, they're so _bad_."

Demetri's voice was very soft, and very warm. "They're wonderful."

Yue's voice was despondent. "They're utterly useless."

"Lady Yue. You underestimate yourself."

She overbalanced, and he turned, and he caught her rather effortlessly. He had strong arms, she thought, and giggled that she had even thought that.

"Are you alright?"

"Please don't look at my drawings," she said again, and he nodded and said, "as you wish," and she laughed and said, "_Princess Bride_?" and he said, "well, what else?" and she said, "you really do seem perfect sometimes," and he said, "If I had a penny for every time someone said that to me, I would have one penny, Lady Yue."

She giggled again. She knew it must be annoying, all this giggling, but she couldn't help it. Everything seemed so funny.

"Just call me Yue. And I think Yue should go to bed."

"I think Yue should as well." He leaned forward and pulled back the covers for her, and Yue sat back down on the bed. "I've left some water here for you. Drink it tonight, if you don't want to suffer tomorrow."

"I've never had a hangover before."

"You're not missing out on anything, I promise." Demetri tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "You'll be alright if I go?"

"Of course I will. Thank you so much for everything, Your Majesty. I had such a wonderful time talking to you tonight."

"And I you." Demetri's eyes were such a deep green colour. In all her drawings, Yue had never quite managed to do them justice. "You will have to start calling me Demetri at some point, you know."

"_Never_," Yue said, almost automatically, and Demetri smiled and shrugged and said again, "as you wish," but truth be told Yue thought that she would call him Demetri if he wanted her to, and wondered if the other girls had been told the same. Of course they had. She wasn't that special.

He leaned forward and pressed his lips to her forehead. Yue shut her eyes, and told herself to remember this tomorrow morning. Whatever happened, she thought, remember this. She could not afford to forget.

"I'll see you soon," he said, very softly, into her hair, and Yue could only nod and watch him slip back out of the room, and then she fell back into her bed and ordered herself, again, quite firmly, _remember this_.

* * *

The force of the explosion was such that it took Theo off his feet, like something from a movie, hit him like a sledgehammer to the chest and actually lifted him, and he landed hard, glass raining around him like the sky had shattered into sharp fragments somewhere high above. The landing drove the breath from his chest; he couldn't draw in enough air to gasp, but life in the rebellion meant that even as he struggled for oxygen he was already crawling forward, staying low to the ground, keeping his head down, one elbow forward and then the next, dragging himself over debris even as the hazy smoke choked low over him and he heard the sound of more explosions around him.

He was just glad that Demetri hadn't been with him, or any of the Selected. It had been a routine run along the border between the Kingdom and Crown-occupied territories, ferrying rebels from one front to another. That was all Theo ever did these days – drive. When he was younger, he had driven his girlfriend between her jobs, and they had listened to music, and laughed, and now he drove killers between their jobs, and they listened to music, and they laughed.

And every so often the black widow queen tried with all her might to kill them.

Theo thought he might have crawled over someone's arm, but it didn't seem to have a someone attached to it any longer. The haze was holding so low over him, he wasn't sure where he was – whether he was crawling away from the danger, or towards it. Maybe he should stay low, lie low, play dead? But even as he thought that, the world shook with another explosion and he knew that Wick Harjo was right: it was too dangerous to stop moving. Rebels were sharks. They couldn't stop moving forward, not if they wanted to live.

He tested his legs. He didn't think he had done too much damage – a cracked rib, maybe that was what was making breathing difficult, a twisted ankle, still okay to run on, a broken finger or two, maybe a concussion? That seemed enough of a miracle, enough that Theo felt able to push himself up and start to sprint, and saw as he did so that this had not been an isolated idea, for all around him, dark silhouettes moved around the fire and through the smoke, running this way and that, like no one knew quite where safety was.

Theo spotted a rifle clutched in the arms of a corpse. He wrenched it away, checked it was loaded, and kept running.

The smoke was clearing now, so he knew that, for better or worse, he was moving away from the explosions. He kept going, but saw no sign around him of any of his comrades – any of the men he had been ferrying, any of the rebels who should have been patrolling this sector, any new garrison descending to provide backup. He emerged out into the clean air, and gasped in deep, despite the burning pain in his ribs, and heard something behind him, and turned.

He turned, and he saw Set Dunin, and the last thing that Theo Malone thought before Set Dunin gestured that his men should open fire was, _Opal Greer McIntyre, I am so sorry._

_I thought we would have more time._

* * *

Liara hadn't realised that one could access the roof of the Smetisko house until she found herself, bored and agitated, in the bedroom that she shared with Atiena, still drunk enough to think it a good idea to crack open the window and ease herself out onto the ledge, but sober enough that her balance was steady as she leapt up, caught herself on the lip of the roof, and boosted herself up to kneel on the very edge of the building. The night air was abruptly cool and refreshing on her face, almost a caress, still carrying the slightest thread of warmth from a scorching day, and above her the stars shone brightly – not quite the gorgeous tableau of forgotten constellations with which the Wasteland's sky had always greeted her, but so much brighter than the empyrean in Angeles, unobscured by the neon glow of falsity on the horizon.

She and Mordred had always climbed out onto the roof as children, first with Demetri and then, after he had been taken, just the two of them, when they could slip away from Ysabel. Liara was sure, now that she was old enough to consider it rationally, that Ysabel had always known where they were sneaking of to, that it had been a secret only in their imaginations, and yet there had always been that small frisson of excitement at having a place that was just theirs, from which they could watch the world pass by, somehow above it all, somehow detached from everything that was meant to be theirs.

They had stopped going up to the roof a few years ago. Mordred didn't have so many opportunities to get away anymore. The last time that they had been together, just the two of them, he had pressed that letter into her hand, and implored her with his eyes – green, just like his older brother's, the only real point of true similarity between them, for though they were both blonde and tall, Mordred had inherited his mother Ysabel's prettiness, her hollow cheekbones and bee-stung lips, her almond eyes and expressive eyebrows, all clean and classical – and yet Liara had been unable to fully decipher exactly what he was trying to ask of her. To stay? To go?

And yet she had known that she had to go. If there was any chance that Demetri was still alive…

There was a light on the other side of the roof. Täj was smoking. Liara didn't smoke, but she walked over to him anyway. He was Demetri's friend, wasn't he? Could she really say that was some consolation, something better than nothing?

She sat down beside him, quite silently, and for a moment wondered if maybe she had miscalculated the climb earlier, if she had plunged down to her death and was now nothing but a ghostly remnant, for all that the pale man reacted to her company. They were sitting on the side of the house by the road, looking down on the quiet cobbled street which wound between two rows of workshops and professional boutiques. Agares was a watchmaker, and there opposite them was the storefront of a schrimpschonger, and beside that, a zymologist, his window lined with dark bottles of expensive liquor. All of the houses on this street were dark, and silent, and for good reason, Liara thought – it was late, and had grown later. The moon was waxing overhead, a silver coin hanging low, and the sky was so still that not even the trees in the courtyard could muster enough energy to sway.

Without speaking, Täj handed Liara the bottle he was holding. She glanced down at it – one of the liquors that Vardi Tayna had earlier secured, the whiskey, still half-full even after the nights revels. She said to the pale man, "thank you," and he only inclined his head in answer. When he moved his head, she could see the jagged black scar on his collarbones, deep and ugly. She wondered what had caused it. Then she said, very softly, "why won't Demetri talk to me?" The alcohol had clearly made her brave; she didn't think she would risk the question otherwise.

"I think he's afraid." Liara took a swig from the bottle; it burned going down, as all whiskey did, but there a smoothness there, a smoky note that reminded her of Trajan's favoured drinks.

"Of me?"

Täj put his cigarette between his teeth; its light was dying, so he raised his lighter to it once more. His success was accompanied by an exhale of a cloud of smoke. It was funny, Liara thought. He didn't smell like a smoker. The scent seemed closer linked to smoke from a wildfire, than to the usual grimy cigarette smell. "Intimidating girl."

"No." She drew the sound out between her teeth, enjoying the sibillance of it all, the way the air whistled through her teeth. "Noooooo….." Her head fell forward, and she smiled. "Intimidating." The thought made her laugh. "As intimidating as a kitten."

Täj chuckled under his breath. "Cold as ice."

"Are you scared of me, then?"

"Oh, a bit."

"You hide it well."

"I do, don't I?"

Below, Liara could see that Demetri was leaving the house. That must mean that Yue had been safely tucked into bed. He was wearing his suit jacket now, and Liara found it amusing to see that he seemed to be aping Angeles styles – it was a deep and vibrant emerald green, his jacket, as rich as it was velvety, the precise same colour as his eyes. Even from this far away, in the dark, she knew that it would match his eyes. More like something Ysabel or Mordred would have worn, than the so-called King of Ashes.

She had never noticed that Täj had green eyes as well. Pale green – not like the king's, not that deep mossy green of deepest and warmest summer, but the soft mint-and-myrtle, like winter grass that had not yet warmed to the thaw of spring. Everything about him was pale, like an over-exposed photograph, like he'd bled out as a child without anyone noticing.

"I thought I was good at telling when people were lying," she said. "Before I came here. Now I can't tell."

"Maybe that's because we're all telling the truth."

"All the time?" She could not help but sound doubtful.

"You don't believe me?"

"I can't. No one would be honest here. No one would be so stupid."

Täj shrugged. "You said it. Not me."

Liara raised the bottle to her lips again. The stars were, she thought, so bright tonight. "What's he like?"

Täj didn't have to ask who she meant. "He's the best man I've ever known."

"Is he really?"

Täj raised one shoulder in a shrug. "I've spent my life with cut-throats and mountebanks. It's not high praise."

Liara laughed softly. "Does he ever mention me?"

Täj fell silent.

Liara felt like she had cracked open her ribs and pulled out her heart, put it on display for anyone to see. Stupid question, she thought. Stupid question. "Never mind."

"He doesn't talk about the palace." Täj's gaze was focused on the horizon. "I don't think he can."

"He doesn't remember?"

Täj's voice was very soft. "He doesn't want to."

* * *

"Oh, my god." The world was no longer spinning. Saran rather wished it still was. It felt like there was a wrecking ball caught behind both of her eyes, striking every time she tried to open them or considered moving from her bed. If she tried to sit up, she thought she was at serious risk of vomiting all over the room, though her throat felt so raw and her stomach so empty that she thought it unlikely she had anything left to retch up. Had she vomited last night, then? "Oh, _khen negen namaig alakh yostoi_..."

Lissa's voice floated over to her from somewhere in the corner of the bedroom they shared in the orphanage, sounding a little hoarser for the night that had preceded, but otherwise very normal. Did the girl have a liver of pure iron? "I don't understand what you're saying, but it doesn't sound like you're having a good time right now."

"I want to die," Saran replied, rather bluntly, and then shut her eyes and nodded and grimaced – yes, she thought, someone should put her out of her misery – as even speaking seemed to make the whole bed lurch distressingly to-and-fro. "What happened?"

"What do you mean, what happened?"

The last thing Saran could remember was… not even leaving the restaurant. Just being in the restaurant. Just sitting and chatting and laughing. She was back in the orphanage, wasn't she? When had that happened? _How_ had that happened?

"I mean exactly what I said." Saran turned in her bed – she was still mostly dressed, she realised, her shoes and jacket removed at some point in the night, her shirt undone like she had decided to take it off but fallen asleep before she could complete the task. As she turned, she caught sight of her shoes placed neatly beside the dresser, her jacket folded and left on the bedside table, her keys set on top of it. "What happened last night?"

"We went out. We came back." Lissa sounded amused, and only seemed doubly so when she yanked open the curtains of the room and Saran made a small, quiet sound of utter soul-draining misery and pulled the covers up over her head. Light did not flood the room - it was still dark outside - but even the pale glow of the lamps outside made the wrecking balls attack Saran's skill with fresh enthusiasm. Lissa said, "I don't understand the question."

"How did I get home?"

"Whathisname brought you. Carried you in, actually." Saran could hear the curl of Lissa's lip in those words, like she was suppressing a smile at the very memory. Something that felt like a very cold hand tightened around Saran's heart.

"The king?" The idea of Demetri having to deal with her sorry drunk self, cart her home, put her to bed, was almost more than she was prepared to take in her hungover state. "Oh god."

"Not the king." Lissa was a mere shadow, a silhouette, as she moved back across their shared room, apparently no worse the wear for their bender the night before. "Not the king." She was filling a glass of water; she set it beside Saran without asking for thanks. Lissa was an odd one, Saran always thought, at once the most childish of the Selection and yet sometimes so prone to a quiet protective instinct. "That other guy."

Saran's heart was sinking. "The pale man?" she said, rather hopefully.

"Nah." Lissa paused beside her bed, a spectral figure in the doused dimness of the dark room. "Harjo."

Well, Saran thought, there was no need for anyone to kill her. She was about to die of embarrassment.

* * *

Mæ̀hmay Klahan had been widowed three times in her life. She told Eden this with the ease one might mention that it had rained earlier in the day, or that she preferred tea to coffee, but with that ease, Eden had felt no need to offer condolences, no awkwardness. That was simply how things were, that was simply what the rebellion had done to the people around them, and death was the natural end to life, so when Mæ̀hmay – she had dismissed Eden's attempts to call her Mrs Klahan with a wave of her hand and a muttered epithet – had heard of the General's death, she had taken one day to grieve her husband of twenty years, just one day, and even on that day she had found time to go to the market and start an argument with an unlucky fishmonger.

The other rebels called the older woman _Pa_, which meant aunty, and after long enough in the house that had once belonged to the Klahan family, Eden had fallen into that habit also. It was a companionable existence, her and Pa, for the most part. Every so often another newspaper would land on the doorstep, graffiteed with some new threat of violence against those who had supported and collaborated with the Crown, and Eden had taken to burning them or ripping them up before Pa caught sight of them, unsure of how much the older woman knew, whether Pa was aware that she sheltered the daughter of one of the Kingdom in Exile's most virulent nemeses, whether she would allow Eden to stay if she ever learned the truth. Eden didn't know which of the rebels was so dedicated to reminding her that she did not belong here – whether it was one of them, or a group, or maybe they all felt this way but only an individual was brave enough to make those sentiments known – and though she tried to keep the paranoia at bay, it was difficult to be around so many strange faces every day without knowing which of them would have happily strung her up and gutted her if not for the paltry protection accorded by her status as one of the Selected.

Today's newspaper read, **TRAIDORES SERÁN DEVORADOS**. _Traitors will be devoured_. She wasn't sure if they were being literal.

She burned this one in the fireplace, watching the flames curl and crush the small portrait of Eden's smiling mother which topped the front page, Vivian Lahela disappearing into cinders and ash before her eyes, and then she stood and brushed her hands, and went to the back door to meet Enyakatho, the propaganda director, and Wren, the second Voice of Illéá, to plan today's segment.

It was such a small gesture, she thought it almost futile, and certainly it had not slowed the abuse to which she had been subjected, but Eden had to try and make herself useful to the rebellion somehow – and given that she had not seen Demetri in many long, long days, she thought it somewhat unlikely that it would be as queen that she would make her mark on the Kingdom in Exile. Instead, she had volunteered to help Enyakatho with what small tasks he would allow her, when he was in town to shoot segments for the Report. You didn't grow up as a Lahela without getting to know your camera angles, without learning to use your light, without developing the skilled knack for likeability which had allowed Eden to weather each photo opportunity and false relationship her mother had thrown at and under her for all these years.

She had been planning today's segment for quite some time, so after she had opened the door to let Enyakatho and Wren inside, and gestured that they should help themselves to the pot of tea that she had brewed and set on the table, she picked up the small binder of scraps and plots that she had gradually accumulated over the past week, and ran her fingers along a few of the words, almost to remind herself of what she was hoping to achieve, and after the propagandist and his one-woman film crew had dismissed the offer good-naturedly ("No need for tea! We had… was it six espressos on the way here, Wren?"), Eden indicated that they should follow her out to the small courtyard that enclosed the Klahan home ("I think it was ten, Enya."), where Pa was sitting on a wooden chair beside the chicken coop, a set of orphaned chicks on the table in front of her ("Caffeine is energy, and energy makes for good TV!") and teaching them how they should eat, by tapping her fingernails very gently on the table, where she had scattered some corn meal. Eden had been fascinated by the whole process when she had first arrived, how baby chickens had to be taught, little by little, how to drink water and how to peck and how to move around the world they occupied, almost like they had been born helpless and would remain so unless someone informed them that they could, feasibly, live otherwise.

"Good morning, _mælngsab_." Pa looked older than her years, as her husband had, with deep crow's feet etched on either side of her dark eyes, a broad, flat nose, and long inky hair now shot through with slender threads of pure silver. She had worn her hair in a tight bun for the first few days that Eden had spent with her, until the Two had braided it for her into twin Dutch plaits on a quiet Friday evening, while they watched the Report. The older woman had worn it in that style since, although Eden still couldn't tell whether that was out of convenience or whether it was because she genuinely liked the style. In any case, she thought it boded well for her own chances at survival, for in the king's absence she thought the widow of his dead Administer for War had to be the next best option for an ally. For that reason alone, Eden was glad she had been placed in this remote farmhouse, and left for the most part to her own devices. It felt less dangerous that trying to contend with the action and intrigue of the Court in Exile. "Aren't you up early?"

"It's just before noon, Pa. I don't think you can call this early."

The older woman just spat on the ground to show what she thought of that, her fingers still tap-tap-tapping to the joy of the chicks scrambling around the table in front of her.

"Where do you want us to set up, Lady Eden?"

Eden indicated, and Enyakatho nodded and he and Wren went away to set up the camera. Pa said, "alright, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up," and Eden laughed and went to the barn to find another chair for herself. This would be a short segment, she thought, but Enyakatho said that her first one, the piece about landmines on the border of the province, had been well-received, so she thought it best not to push her luck.

She wondered if her mother had seen it.

She wondered what her mother had thought of it.

She wondered if she cared.

"Okay, _pa_, I'm going to ask you a few questions, is that okay?" She had the questions written on the page in front of her, numbered carefully, immaculately, and she had a sheet with the narration she wanted Wren to provide over that, an introduction to who Mæ̀h̄m̂āy Klahan was and why she was important. The General's widow. The closest thing the Selected, Vardi Tayna, had to a mother. The woman who had helped to raise the stolen crown prince. Sometimes Eden wondered which of Pa's traits Demetri had inherited. Did he have her dark sense of humour, her inability to suffer fools, her inclination to think the worst of everyone around her and be clearly delighted when they proved her right? Did he have her forthright manner, her thoughtfulness in her action, her thoughtlessness in her words? Eden thought it unlikely. It wouldn't befit a king to behave in such a manner. "Let me know if you want a break or anything. There's only a few. And then we'll get some footage of the horses and the chickens and the house, okay?"

"I think I can manage."

Eden smiled. She checked the set-up that Enyakatho had provided, and moved the camera ever-so-slightly, so that Pa was framed in the corner of the screen, small and yet undiminished even as the image was for the most part dominated by the cornflower blue sky that seemed to stretch endlessly beyond her. Pa had a demanding screen presence; she drew the eye, even if she was not the apparent focus of the camera. Eden wanted this to seem natural, like they had just come across Pa and started a conversation by chance.

"Mrs Klahan," Eden began. "When you lived in Angeles, what did you like best about the city?"

The film crew seemed very surprised at this line of questioning - "I thought we were filming propaganda for us, not for them," Wren hissed – but Pa smiled and leaned forward in her seat and started, with that rhythmic way of hers, to answer the question as she answered all questions, not quite addressing directly what Eden had said but clearly working her way around to it. That was good, Eden thought, because she could cut the question out later, make it all seem so much more natural.

"I went first to Angeles when I was fourteen years old, because my father had found work there as a chef. He was known as the best chef in all of Krung Thep, and Krung Thep is known for its chefs, so you can imagine how wonderfully he cooked. Now, that's how I went first to the palace, and coming from such a busy city – we were originally from the mountains but Daddy moved us to the city because that's where the restaurants were – and coming from such a busy city, the first thing I realised about Angeles was how _clean _everything was, and how polite the people. No one shouted! The cars stopped when you crossed the road. When you asked in the shop what the price was, they told you, and that was that. Now, I liked that fine, but my Daddy always said that it lacked _character_. Well, I thought it had a very nice character, and when my father started working in the palace, I thought it was the most beautiful building I had ever seen, and that it had plenty of character as well."

"Was that where you met General Klahan?"

"Well, when we came to Illéa the first time, because King Trajan, may his bones rest gently, King Trajan invited us, Huyhn's family were of the same tribe as us, both Akha, and our mothers had been friends, so we lived with them first, before King Trajan's father gave us an apartment in the palace. And when King Trajan's Selection was announced, I was invited to participate, because I was the right age, but Huyhn asked that I did not join for his sake – so I didn't, and went away, and married someone else!" Pa laughed.

"The path of love never did run smoothly," Eden agreed. "What happened to your first husband?"

"Well, Ysabel had his head put on a pike." Pa had such a knack for saying these things casually. "I can't remember what he did, but that is how these things go."

"Can you tell me anything about Demetri?"

"Well, when my husband rescued him first, and brought him home, and asked me to feed him and clothe him and be something of a foster mother to him, as you might to a foal whose dame has rejected it, I remember thinking to myself that he was such a small boy, and so prone to politeness, he refused to to ever disagree with you. All that same Angeles _character _that my father had so hated when he first came to Illéa, and yet when he met our little prince Demetri, he said to me, _I rather see the appeal of this sort of character_, and that was that."

"Your family looked after Demetri?"

"Well, we looked after him when he first arrived here, soothed him when he cried at night. Daddy used to cook for him, and taught him how to cook, and Huyhn always said that we must treat him as Trajan would have wanted us to treat him, and raise him as Trajan and Jael would have. When my father got ill, Demetri looked after him like any good grandson would, but he was not always a good grandson, for my father used to say, _do not go to war, do not give your life, you were not born to die_, and Demetri always used to say "what use is a king who will not fight for his kingdom?" and joined the rebellion before my father's corpse was even cold."

A voice behind Eden said, "you make me sound so heartless, _pa_."

Eden spun. There he was – the king himself, his hair slightly dishevelled, looking a little drawn and worn but smiling brightly despite that. Eden had met Mordred several times, and always found him a little too cold and clean, always perfectly coiffed, in perfectly tailored clothes, never inclined to listen or speak to the people around him, except maybe to exchange a few short words with Liara Lee if she happened to pass him with her friends. Eden Lahela had belonged to the elite of Angeles, but even she had not quite reached the highest echelons occupied by the courtiers and their children.

"Your Majesty." Eden curtsied low, but Demetri jerked with his head to indicate that she should straighten.

"Please. You've just heard my foster mother talk about my night terrors. You might as well call me Demetri."

"Demetri. My apologies." Eden could not help but feel a bit like a leech right now, caught creating some voyeuristic video which made a show out of his family's trauma, transformed the people who had helped him into some sort of propagandised saviours for the purposes of cheap views. "I didn't realise you would be… coming by."

"No one did." Demetri smiled the same way that Pa did, Eden saw, first one side of his mouth and then the other, created crookedly and yet quite symmetric as a full expression. "What can I say? I was feeling spontaneous." He indicated her set-up. "What sort of camera are you using?"

Eden looked at it, almost like she didn't understand what he was asking her.

"It's a Panaflex, I think. 35mm film."

"What sort of lens are we talking?"

Eden almost smiled. Demetri spoke like he knew what she was talking about – but she had never heard anything about him being interested in photography, in film. This was some other kingly skill, the surface-level knowledge of every imaginable topic of conversation, to best feign expertise, to best put others at ease, to make conversation at banquets with foreign dignataries and visiting nobles. It didn't belong here, in the dusty courtyard of an old farm. Maybe he had spent the drive over here learning all of the jargon he thought might be necessary for this conversation. "C series. Anamorphic lens."

"I like that. Bit of personality."

"Not quite crystal clarity." Wren and Enyakatho were stepping away, apparently aware that at this point, they were almost intruding; Pa, a slight smile on her face, had turned away and was making her way back down the path, towards the stables, to check on the horses, leaving Eden and Demetri alone in the courtyard, still separated by half a dozen feet of space.

"It's a personality piece. You don't need clarity for that, Lady Eden." Demetri tilted his head. "But it brings in some texture, I suppose?"

"It ought to." Eden's voice was wry.

"Show me." It was not an order, as Ysabel might have given; it was a request, uttered very softly, but Eden was more than delighted to humour him.


	17. Let Me Make My Heaven

**Chapter Seventeen: Let Me Make My Heaven**

* * *

_They blamed us just for bein' what we are but they might as well go  
__Chasing after moonbeams or light a candle from a star._

\- Arthur Colahan

* * *

That day, the Crown learned of successes and failures alike.

Mordred reclined in the throne that had been his father's, and looked away from Commander Lee for the first time since he had walked into the room, to look across the stony faces of the counsellors he had permitted to sit in on this meeting, fanned out in a crescent half-moon shape following the curve of the chamber's northern wall. The Queen Regent had elected, as she always did, to sit among them, shoulder-to-shoulder with Mordred's Minister for War and Minister for Intelligence, old men and women with salt and pepper at the temples dressed in neat suits of muted colours, and now she leaned forward in her seat as though it were possible to focus closer on what the military general had to say. He was just finishing his report, his hands clasped behind his back, his back as straight as an iron rod: "….and captured twelve men in all. We suffered six casualties and no fatalities."

"Captured?" Mordred nodded thoughtfully, his pale eyes distant, watching the mosaic on the far wall of the throne room rather than meeting his general's eye. "And what of the interrogation, Commander?"

"We have broken the scum, your Majesty."

Ysabel winced a little to hear such terms used. Mordred had to think of what he had said to his mother all those weeks ago, watching the false Demetri's Selection on the television. _We've fought for peace,while they have fought for power. _That was the only justification that they could cling to, these days. They fought for an end to the fighting. They killed for an end to the killing. They bled for an end to the bleeding.

Mordred's voice was slow-dripping venom. "_And_?"

Commander Lee looked to Set for permission to continue, but it was Mordred's uncle who stepped forward to answer the question. He had participated in the battle himself, though Ysabel had begged him for the past fifteen years to leave the front-line to those more disposable than he, to the soldiers who had signed up to offer their lives in the name of Illéa, to those without whom the strategies of the Crown would not be utterly crippled. Set had always said he could not leave his men to face a threat from which he would run, and the legacy of that integrity was apparent on his features – his face was deeply bruised; he had a swollen lip that threatened to burst and a set of delicately tiny stitches beside one eye, now thoroughy blackened in waning shades of ochre and purple. "Majesty. The information received is… privileged."

"Leave us," Mordred said coolly, and though his gaze had not moved from the far wall, his counsellors knew to whom he spoke and rose as one. They moved hastily from the throne room; the look in Mordred's eyes had brooked no argument. The Queen Regent joined them, clearly returning to the business of the Selection, the exhaustion of dealing with the start of such an enormous event etched deeply around her eyes and mouth in the shape of wavering crow's feet. When the enormous mahoghany door at the far end of the space had slammed shut once more, Mordred looked at his uncle to continue and, with a clearing of his throat that suggested some trepidation on the part of Set, he began.

"Mordred. The information we have received has led us to believe three things of importance to you. The first: our spy in the rebellion may be at some risk. We believe that they have been, if not identified, then they will be soon, and eliminated."

"Unfortunate," Commander Lee said. "But hardly crippling. We survived a long while without a mole. We'll survive a long while more."

Mordred inclined his head, narrowed his eyes. They would not have been able to co-ordinate their air strikes without the intelligence offered to them by their spy, but in the long weeks which had passed since, the information that their asset could offer had slowed to a trickle. The Kingdom in Exile was clearly taking steps to ensure that the girls could not be found, or at least, not together. The last few raids by the Crown had been fruitless. Truth be told, he suspected their spy had rather outlived its usefulness. "Is there any way to extract our asset?"

Set's mouth twisted. "It would be difficult. And there's no guarantee we could mobilise in time. They may be killed before that can happen."

"I want you to try. Anyone who risks their lives in the name of Illéa deserves to have that life valued."

Set nodded, and looked to Commander Lee to offer the next piece of information. Mordred could have guessed it before the older man had even shaped the first consonant: "there is, furthermore, reason to believe the rebellion have placed a spy within the palace. Deep within the court."

Mordred frowned. "We knew that already."

The rebel's General had been captured during a rendez-vous with the same – Adminster Nihata Guptacara, one of the legacies of his father's cabinet, who had begun his career as a military attaché under the General. The General had been killed live on television during an interrupted Report broadcast, but Nihata had been killed slowly in the dungeons under the palace. _Broken_, as Lee would have put it.

"No," Set said. "Another spy. One that escaped our investigation the first time around. It is doubtful that Nihata even knew of their existence."

Mordred set his jaw, and nodded. "Well. That's two. What's the third piece of news? Please, give me something good."

Lee and Set again exchanged looks in a silent battle to determine who should bear this responsibility.

"_Today_, gentlemen."

Set did away with any grand formalities. "It's Liara, Mordred. She's still alive. Still in the Selection, but… she's alive. Or she _was_, this time last week."

Mordred's expression did not change, but his uncle knew him well enough to see that there was something like grief or relief in his eyes at this news. "A lot happens in a week," he said softly, and nodded. It took him a moment to put the steel and ice back into his voice. "Very well. Thank you for your reports. I would be very grateful if you could close the doors behind you when you leave, and keep me apraised of any more intelligence you gather."

Set nodded at Commander Lee that this was their cue to make a tactful exit. They began to do so with some haste, Set hurrying back to the infirmary to check on the six men who had been injured in the attack, Lee moving with the purposefulness of a man who has yet more hostages to torture before the night is out. They were, however, stopped at the threshold of the throne room by a single word –

"Henry."

Liara's father turned, clearly surprised to hear his given name in the mouth of a royal, and spoken so insolently at that. Set couldn't quite resist the instinct to turn either. Mordred's voice was very cold indeed as he spoke.

"Whoever this spy is. When you find them, I want you to make an example of them."

Set's eyes were set very firmly on his nephew, but Mordred seemed utterly oblivious to his scrutiny as General Lee bowed from the waist and said, quite seriously, "historians shall write of the treatment we inflict on the traitor."

Mordred said, "sounds good to me," and the last thing Set saw before the throne room doors closed on him and his general was the young king, somewhat slouched in his throne, gazing at a letter in his hand with something like melancholy in his eyes.

* * *

To Eden's surprise, Demetri proved something of a capable conversationalist. He had suggested that they leave the yard and Pa's prying eyes behind, and slipped down towards the river that demarcated the far end of the Klahan's property, where tiny little minnows darted through the silvery shimmery surface of the water. The light was good here, Eden thought, all golden and maple, filtered through the amber foliage of the trees that lined the other bank. Dust and dandelion spores were rising, hazily, and spinning, gently, just above the points of the grass, and it seemed quite natural and quite comfortable to lower herself and sit beside Demetri, not quite close enough for their knees to touch, her camera resting on her lap.

He leaned back on his hands, tilted his head back, and closed his eyes, as though to enjoy the last rays of sun on his face. Eden had been saying something about Richard Avedon, and his work in portraitures, the way that he had used chiarascuro and shadows, and she was careful not to slow the flow of her words as she raised her camera, aimed it as naturally as speaking, and snapped a quick, almost casual, photograph of the king. She didn't have time to think about whether it was a good idea; the sound of the shutter made him open his eyes, and tilt his head towards her, and smile, and she snapped another, as instinctual as blinking her eyelids. He said, "always working, aren't you, Lady Eden?"

"I know a good tableau when I see one." She glanced down at the monitor, and was pleased to see that they had both turned out beautifully – the rays of light had made Demetri's dark green eyes seem almost otherworldly, emphasised the sharp lines of his jaw and cheekbones, made his tousled hair look like so much liquid brass. She had heard so many people describe him as blonde, seen all the propaganda photos of him as a little boy with wheat-bleach locks, but it had always looked slightly dun in person until just this moment, when it seemed like someone had threaded little strands of gold amongst the rest. "I can stop if you want."

"It's flattering." Demetri managed to make it sound like he was reluctant to concede as much, almost as though they were already good friends embedded in a duel of teasing conversation in which neither wished to admit defeat. He had such a disarming way of speaking, low and rich, that made the simplest words sound intimate, like he was speaking for her ears only. Was this how he had won so much loyalty, she wondered, by convincing each individual person that they were the most important thing in his life for a few seconds at a time? A girl more gullible than Eden might have believed it. "But you're not on the clock, Lady Eden."

"I enjoy capturing beautiful things," she replied. That Demetri seemed to be putting on a performance made it easier for her as well – she was a girl accustomed to public speaking, for whom any true emotion made the words congeal in her throat, stopped her from truly ever saying smoothly anything that required more than her mother's voice in the back of her mind to conjure. Eden could do banter. She had perfected as much in all of her socialite escapades, all of her little dinner parties, all the plastic dates set up by Vivian where she just had to smile and make small talk and look pretty. And yet, this wasn't quite a plastic date, was it? She couldn't put her finger on it, but although they were both being cautious, dancing around anything real, she thought she was able to sense the roots snaking just beneath the surface, the potential for something deeper.

Demetri laughed. "Sounds like you're planning on locking someone up." He shook his head. "The General used to collect butterflies in jars," he added, looking pensive. Eden supposed it was only natural that being back here, in the space which he had originally shared his earliest days of captivity with his abductors, would draw his mind back to Klahan. Pa had spoken a little bit about the boy that he had been, but truth be told Eden couldn't quite imagine him as that little boy from all of the Report programmes, small and pale and aristocratically delicate, here in the quiet, restrained wilderness of Pa's broad back pasture. "Like little moving paintings." He smiled and oh, Demetri had a smile like no-one else. When Demetri smiled, it pulled a little higher on one side, made the expression look slightly crooked and unbalanced, a tiny imperfection that somehow made the rest of it look a little bit better for not being uncannily flawless. She had always thought Mordred a handsome enough fellow, but Mordred hardly ever smiled, and even frowning Demetri seemed to outshine him a few thousand times over. "He always said it was easy, if you knew how."

"Most things are," Eden replied lightly. "In my experience."

His only response was another smile. He ran his hands through the strands of grass nearest him, his fingers twining gently around the stem of the daisies and the honeysuckle which grew nearest him. They were sitting so quietly, Eden could see the little grey rabbits which were endemic in Pa's backyard creeping a little closer, a little braver now that Eden and Demetri had paused to listen to the breeze creep through the leaves and the river run gently across the rocks. "Some things are never easy," Demetri said finally. "Even with practise."

"Spoken like someone who hasn't had enough yet."

He just held his hand out for the camera, and, after a moment of hesitation, Eden handed it to him. He turned it carefully in his hand. It was not, of course, Eden's own – she had not been accorded the opportunity to be so careful in what she chose when the rebels arrived to draw her into the Selection, only grabbing those things precious to her that she had close at hand: her notebook, her lucky pen, a drawing that the young daughter of the family's driver had made of Eden and her as princesses, the sun wearing a smile and some sunglasses behind them. No, the camera had been borrowed from Enyakatho shortly after she had helped him to tighten a lacklustre script for a propaganda piece about a mining accident on the edge of Allens, and Eden had been using it to document as much of the ordinary rebel life here in the seceded territories as she could. On the rare occasion that she was allowed into the nearby town, she had talked a few old women into letting her create their portraits, or taken pictures of stray dogs in the street, or captured an argument between merchants, both bearing the sharp Ⴟ brand that marked them as thieves from the Russian Federation. Truth be told, Eden wasn't sure yet what use she would ever find for the photos, but she was sure they would be useful somewhere, sometime.

Demetri raised the borrowed camera. Eden tilted her head and smiled, in that practised way that had seen her grace a dozen magazine covers in Angeles before she was eighteen. She held the pose for a second, then, relaxed into a frown and said, "is it not working?"

"I can't seem to find the button," Demetri said, sounding puzzled, and Eden laughed, and that was when the shutter clicked and she had to laugh again at how transparently she had been tricked.

"Beautiful," Demetri said, and Eden knew he wasn't talking about just the photograph.

* * *

"Why am I not surprised you found your way down here?"

When Thiago came for Corvina Rouen, she wasn't sure whether he was about to rebuke her in the tunnels under the safehouse for the simple crime of discovering them, or if she was finally getting her wish, to speak Thiago on some sort of level playing field, to make her pitch for an alliance and equality. Pandora could help the rebellion, she knew, could smooth their path and allow the revolution to run over land already trampled down by the force of Corvina's trained criminals.

She had come back down to the tunnels, after Marjorie had gone to bed, and gone straight back towards the room they had seen, the one with the single screen, with the hidden person within. But the land below was a labyrinth, and it had taken Cor longer than she was willing to admit to retrace her steps and find the office in question, and when she did, Thiago Wesick was standing there with a flashlight and a gun in his belt. He did not seem inclined to draw the latter, at least initially.

"Curiosity killed the cat," Thiago added.

"Satisfaction brought it back." Cor's lip curled. "Got something to hide, Adminster?"

Was it her imagination, or did he smile, ever so slightly, at those words?

"This makes my job a little bit easier," he said, and gestured that she should follow him, and so she did. For a moment, there was no sound but their footsteps on the bare concrete, and then: "have you ever heard of a man called Artur Gildas?"

Of course she had. Gildas had been – well, not _legend_. But he had held quite a few underworld records in his day. Records that Corvina had since claimed for her own, of course.

Thiago did not bother waiting for an answer, for he continued. "Artur ran a racket. He moved cargo across province lines, dodged the Crown, made sure his products got to where they needed to be, and bribed or murdered anyone who got in his way." Thiago paused. "Man of few compunctions, our Artur. He dealt mainly in children."

Cor's eyes narrowed. She had dealt in many dirty businesses, but children – that was a monster's game.

"But the rebellion needed him. We needed him. How else could we smuggle our stolen king back into the Wasteland? We needed his supply channels. His contacts. But Artur made a fatal mistake. He let one child speak to another. He let our king see the suffering of those Artur called his little sparrows."

They came to a door, and entered. The room within had been stripped bare. A cell.

"And when Demetri grew up, and when Artur realised that our king was not the type of man to let these sins go unanswered, he fled north, he fled north where he thought that the hand of the Kingdom would not reach." Thiago paused. "Haven't you ever wondered why they call me the Butcher of St. George?"

Cor hadn't needed to wonder. She had seen it, in the images ferried back to her by the network of the Pandora gang. _Massacre _didn't half-describe it. "You took him out."

"I took his organisation out. Root and stem. Artur learned that the Kingdom in Exile does not countenance lawlessness." Thiago turned to Cor. "I think it is your turn to learn that lesson, Lady Corvina."

Lights up behind him. They were standing in front of a window – a sort of observational window, maybe a one-way mirror.

Cor felt her blood run cold that. That was her sister. _Khione_. She had been badly beaten – one brown eye swollen shut and red slowly trickling down her temple, her long, curly hair matted with blood and dirt, slumped against the ties that bound her to the chair in which she was shackled. She looked hungry, somehow gaunt, and paler than before, as though she had been languishing below the ground for days.

Weeks?

How long ago had the Selection started?

How many of the Selected had had their families abducted by the rebellion in this manner? Just Cor? Was she the only one dangerous enough for this to be deemed a necessity? Or were the others here as well – some of Lissa's homeless network, Saran's sister, Yue's family?

She ached for the familiar weight of a pistol at her hip. A knife in her hand. _Anything_ with which she could try to strike out at Thiago. But his gun was there, and her hands were bare, and there was a sound behind her that announced the arrival of the king himself. She spun to face him, and saw that Demetri was carrying no weapons, but Thiago was like a spectre behind her, and she wasn't sure she trusted herself to be quick enough with what she had to do. Maybe she could talk her way out of this. She could talk her way out of this.

"The criminal gang you call Pandora cannot be permitted to continue operating unabated." Demetri's voice was almost bored. "I will not allow my citizens to live in fear of ruthless, lawless brigands. Dismantle it, Miss Rouen, or I shall be forced to send in my butcher."

Cor's eyes bored into his. "You think you'll be able?"

"I am confident." Demetri smiled. "Khione Rouen, Knox Harlen, Viridia Cox, Kanon Justus – all of your hitmen and thieves and brothel madams have had visits from Thiago."

Thiago's voice was silky soft. "I would commend you on their loyalty, but it was the worse for them in the end. Sometimes the cowards have an easier time of it."

Demetri said, "Artur learned that the hard way."

Cor swung on him, but Thiago had his hand on his gun. Cor wasn't sure she trusted Kanon's self-defence training to be faster than this man's draw. "We are _nothing_ like Artur Gildas. Trafficking in people is something I would never -"

"But you deal in drugs, you deal in flesh, you deal in guns. Make no mistake, Lady Corvina, children have died because of your desire for power, for wealth. You have stolen hope from poor men and women. You have profited from the poverty and death of others. You are _exactly _like Artur Gildas."

"We have a code."

"So did Artur." Demetri's voice was cold. "Everyone always does. Everyone has the line they won't cross."

Thiago shook his head. "Everyone _says _they do."

Demetri inclined his head. "Yes." He sounded sad. "Everyone has a code. Doesn't mean they're not still liars and killers, in the service of liars and killers." He stepped forward, and Thiago moved around him to join him by the door, so that both were silhouetted against the frame, narrow spectres of savagery.

"You're locking me up down here." Cor's voice was almost bewildered.

"I was hoping your family could be persuaded." Demetri shrugged. "I kill you, Pandora does their best to take revenge. Probably not fatal to our rebellion… but an inconvenience. I continue to let you run rampant, and my people suffer. I keep you here, promise not to hurt you as long as they hibernate for a little while..."

Thiago said, "your people are loyal, aren't they, Corvina?"

"To the _death_."

Demetri said, over Cor's head, like she wasn't even there, "they'll try to save her."

"They'll _try_."

"Thiago will be your warden, my dear." She could see that Demetri was already gone, at least mentally, his mind already slipping, moving onto the next problem, Corvina forgotten. He considered her _dealt with_. "Try not to get on his bad side."

Something had happened. She could see the vein jumping in his jaw. Something had happened. Something bad. The rebellion was closing ranks, nerves spasming in its death throes. _What had happened_? "I can help," she said, and her voice did not sound like her own when she did, sounded oddly smooth and calm, more persuasive than even she usually tended to be. "What you're doing here, trying to cut off my operation, trying to fight a war on two fronts – we can be allies. I can _help_."

There was something oddly cold in Demetri's eyes. "I don't accept help from people like you."

And yet he stood beside Thiago, and led a rebellion, cut a swathe through this nation to take a crown and a title, to assert a blood-right no more tenable than moonlight twisting in your grasp.

One last chance. "You'd put your image above the lives of your men? You're no better than Ysabel."

She had struck a nerve. She could see it in the way that the vein jumped in his jaw. "Indeed," Demetri agreed. "It's starting to look that way."

* * *

The Inner Circle had always joked that Täj was the friend you called when you had a body to bury, but it had been a very long time since his services had been called on in that manner. There was no need for furtiveness. The Kingdom in Exile killed in public now, and called it righteousness. Täj was no longer a murderer, but the executioner of the rightful king of Illéa.

It had been a very long time indeed.

He couldn't say that he had missed it very much.

"Jesus Christ, Tayna. What did you _do_?"

She had blood on her face. He asked what she did, but he did not ask on whose orders. He knew better than that.

He circled the corpse. One of the Selected. He hadn't got to know this one very well, but she was still a girl, a young girl, only a little older than Vardi Tayna. A few years ago he might have felt bad about this, how she lay there like a mannequin with its strings cut. But it had been a long time since Täj had permitted sentiment to intrude on these sorts of matters.

It had been a very long time indeed.

He couldn't say that he had missed it very much.

Vardi Tayna did not pace, as another might, but stood just to the side, still holding her knife. Blood on her face. She was feral. How could he have allowed himself to forget that? Still the wild girl from the wastes. Still more storm than subject. Still feral.

"I did what needed to be done."

She always did. She always had. He looked at her and abruptly the last fifteen years had melted away and they were mere children once more, stranded in the hinterlands among wolves with only one another to rely on. They had been here before. The Inner Circle had always joked that Täj was the friend you called when you had a body to bury, but it had always been the two of them, no matter which names they used, committing their sins to the soil and their sins to the silence of the other. They always did what needed to be done.

It had been a very long time indeed.

He couldn't say that he hadn't missed this.


	18. Common Bird or Petal

**Chapter 18:****Common Bird or Petal**

* * *

_A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains all that man is,_

_All mere complexities, the fury and the mire of human veins._

\- W.B. Yeats

* * *

Rather than go back to the usual places and face the wrath of Givre or Wick or someone else with their heads on their shoulders rather than their heart in their hands, Demetri left Thiago to deal with Marjorie and with the girl trapped under the ground and went south again, just a few miles this time, to the little apartment building in what had once been Sumner, where Uzohola had been staying for a day or two. The rebels rarely got a break, the Inner Circles even more rarely, and if Uzohola hadn't come down with something that the camp doctors alternately diagnosed as malaria or dengue fever or maybe just some sort of stress-induced fever, Demetri knew that she would not have rested until he was on the throne in Angeles with the crown on his brow. But rest had been ordered, and on his way back south towards the Wasteland, he stopped to make sure that she was listening to her orders.

He brought her favourite Nigerian soups, and they ate together in companionable silence, switched on the television and piled together on the couch like they had when they were children. The heater was broken, so Uzohola pulled a blanket over them and Demetri's arm around her. They had watched the movie a few dozen times before; it was some black-and-white film about a princess' wild night on some European town, and Demetri found himself paying little attention to it, so concerned was he with the matters that had consumed his days and weeks.

Uzohola nuzzled closer to him, and Demetri pressed his cheek to her wild curls, finding some small degree of comfort in the familiarity of it all. Thiago was his spymaster, Wick one of his closest friends, and Vardi Tayna a persistent thorn. Even Täj was his blood brother, someone without whom he would be dead and nameless and lost a thousand times over. But Uzohola was his oldest comrade, his most loyal companion, his _udade_, and being around her was as natural as breathing. She said, "if it was me, what would you do?"

Demetri frowned. "You mean..."

"If Cor or Artur or Ysabel or _any_ of them did to me what you did to that girl. That Khione. What would you do?"

He pressed his lips together. "That's irrelevant."

"How so?"

Because, he thought, Ysabel had done worse to him, worse to all that he had cared about, and would do worse a thousand times again. Because, he thought, he had seen what Artur had done to Täj, when the pale man was a pale boy and still had all of his soft edges. Because, he thought, he had seen the world that people like Cor created for people like Yenifer, how it had made its survivors few and cruel. And because, he thought, he would never let any such thing happen to Uzohola. The idea was anathema. Uzohola was strong, but the others protected her nonetheless.

He was silent for so long that Uzohola spoke again. "You could have made some sort of deal with them."

"No." His voice was firm. "Täj would never forgive me."

"Täj isn't the king."

He peered at Uzohola suspiciously. "Playing Lady Macbeth, are we?"

"You know what I mean."

"I don't intend to become king of the ashes, Uzo. What's the point of winning more land if we can't defend it? The People in Exile should be able to live free of exploitation by cheap gangsters like Corvina Rouen."

"You know," Uzohola said sleepily. "Sometimes I think you'll make a great king. And other times I remember that you're the most stubborn fucking man that I've ever met."

"_Va__la umlomo uye kulala_," he said, very softly – _shut up and go to sleep._

Uzohola just laughed under her breath, pressed her lips into his sleeve and said, "you know I'm right."

"Can we change the subject now? I've spent my entire day talking about smoke and daggers and bloodshed. Maybe you can tell me about yours for a change." His voice was laced thick with innuendo.

She punched him lightly in the arm. "Stop."

"What did I say?" Demetri smiled. "Come on. It's been six years, Uzo. If I get married before you do, it'll be seriously embarrassing… for _you_."

"I've already told Xïta that I want to get married in the cathedral in Angeles. No use proposing until that's an option."

"And how does Xïta feel about this?"

Uzohola was amused. "He doesn't get an opinion."

"Seems like a functional relationship, alright."

"Men dragging their feet in their Selection don't get to judge other people's relationships. That's, like, a rule or something."

"If you say so, comrade."

"I do say so."

He knew better than to try arguing with her by now.

* * *

Over the past weeks in Raphael's house, Yue had found herself slipping into a routine with a frightening ease, so facilely and fluidly that some small part of her whispered that, Selection or no Selection, it would be so easy to stay here forever and live this simple provincial life of errands in the market and helping Agares prepare dinner for the whole little family and walking Feste by the river. Demetri was such a small presence in their life that it would have been forgivable for Yue to forget, to smile back at the boy in the market who sold her two pounds of salmon every Friday, to look at the little colourful houses for sale in the street with more than mere whimsical wonder. She and Atiena and Liara had prised the boards off the door of one such house once, a few days ago, and ducked in amongst the flowering bouquets of exquisite pink and purple bougainvillea. While the others had explored, Yue had wandered through the lower floors, one hand on the mantelpiece sending little flurries of dust into the air, and admired how the light had splayed onto the floorboards like honey, and thought of how, with books piled here and there and a fire in the hearth and a couch against the wall, this could so easily feel like the kind of home she only dared to dream of when she didn't think anyone was around to catch the longing in her eyes. There had been a little balcony as well, the struts twined with wild honeysuckle and climbing hydrangea, which looked out onto the busy street, an emulation of a Parisian terrace. The cobbles below had been quiet, so early the hour, and Yue thought that this might be where she would drink her tea in the morning, or read her books in the evening, and how quiet such a life might be.

She almost didn't dare to hope. It seemed too lovely.

The mornings all began uniformly, and early, for that was the rhythm of Raphael's routine. Feste, the many-named dog, would have curled up on Yue's bed at some point in the night, so light and small as to have lain unnoticed until she woke. He would lead her downstairs, for it had been agreed rather silently between the lot that Yue and Atiena were somehow now responsible for the well-being of the little hound, and Atiena often said it was the only thing preventing her from contracting cabin fever. Vardi Tayna would be in the bed next to Yue only sometimes – if she was there, she would just mutter something about the harshness of the sun and roll over to sleep until noon. If she was not there, Yue would rarely see her until the late evening. She was not there today. Yue did not bother to wonder about that anymore.

Atiena would have risen about an hour before the rest of them, and would be doing exercise in the courtyard – silent and purposeful and strong. No amount of placid provincial living could change her instinct to remain ready for anything, Yue thought, and wondered if she was being accorded a tiny glimpse in miniature of the fate of the rest of the rebels whenever this war was done, if they would be trapped like the clockwork figurines in Agare's grandfather clocks, doomed to tread the same track again and again, without respite from the demons and threats that lurked only in their own minds. But Raphael seemed to have managed it. The tall blonde woman was peaceable, though she still had the sort of muscles that Yue had only ever seen before on Olympic weightlifters or seasoned blacksmiths, the kind of strong arms that belied how many of Agares' _kanafeh_ she could wolf down in a single sitting. Yue sometimes found herself wondering if maybe, when she saw Atiena and Raphael side-by-side, if maybe she was glimpsing the same soul ten or fifteen years apart. If anyone deserved to rest, and to fight no more, it was Atiena Morris.

Feste could be relied upon to go out and fetch Atiena, and tell her that breakfast had been prepared; Liara would have already begun in the kitchen, allowing Agares a few precious minutes to finish up on whatever small cogs she had been tinkering with in her workshop in the bowels of the house. Yue saw in the Lee girl the same instinct that she felt, to make herself useful in whatever small way she could, but she thought that maybe it had different stems. Yue hated the idea of being useless; Liara actively wanted to be useful. Yue supposed she was used to being waited on, in the Lee household, nestled at the heart of the Angeles' court, but to look at Liara now, you would never be able to guess that fact – she fended for herself, and fared for the others, as well as Atiena or Agares did. In fact, Yue thought ruefully, she had very nearly mastered Agares' recipe for _ghozi_. This morning, though, she was laying out the usual Layeni fare: strips of cold salmon and quarters of hard-boiled eggs, an array of breads, some soft cheese, a bowl of yogurt and another bowl of mixed seeds and spices. Liara had got up early enough to make _baozi_, and a small bowl of them stood steaming near Vardi Tayna's usual chair. Though Yue and Liara and Vardi Tayna all clearly shared New Asian heritage, any attempts by the two more northern girls to speak to the rebel in a New Asian language had been met by a blank stare. She had spoken enough Wutun to tell Liara to go back to English; Raphael had laughed, and later told Yue that Vardi Tayna was a child not of New Asia, but of the wastes. "I think she learned English from the wolves," the older woman had added ruefully. And yet the little wasteland rebel devoured _baozi_ like she was starving. So clearly Liara expected her back for breakfast.

Yue brewed the tea. Usually she was up before Liara; she still slept lightly in the house, so alive did it always seem with creaking floorboards and shifting foundations and people in every room, be it Vardi Tayna in the bed next to her or Wick asleep on the couch downstairs. But last night she had stayed up so late finishing the book that Demetri had last given her that she had fallen asleep only a few hours before dawn. It had been worth it, she thought, though the heroine's sad fate still occupied a central part of her mind even as she went through her usual morning rituals.

"Don't forget Täj's oolong," Liara said lightly as she finished putting plates on the table, and Yue smiled into the teapot at the older girl's concern.

"I won't."

Atiena still exclusively drank coffee, much like Raphael, so the split usually came to Liara and Täj drinking oolong and Yue and Agares drinking chamomile. Yue set down the teapots, and Liara did not have to ring any bell or call out, because everyone had become used to the routine by now, which meant that Atiena came in the backdoor and Raphael was arriving in the front, and Agares was coming up from her workshop.

"It's getting colder out there," Raphael said, as she took her seat beside Agares near the head of the table. A little frost still clung to the shoulders of her old green sweater, which brought out the deep mossy colour of her eyes. "Old Deacon thinks the river is going to freeze over before the festival."

"You were an ice skater, weren't you, Yue?" Agares looked at the northern girl with a smile. The watchmaker was wearing a dark purple headscarf today; it brought out the flecks of hazel in her dark brown eyes. "Maybe if the river freezes, you can show us your moves."

Atiena laughed as she reached past Liara to heap her plate with little bread rolls. "If I could put a single foot on ice without falling on my ass, I would consider it a miracle. I have no idea how people like you pull it off."

Yue smiled at her plate. "Just lots of practise." She sighed. "I started very young." And, she added silently, she had grown to hate the ice. Skating meant screaming and slipping and never being good enough. In Raphael's house, she rarely looked at herself in the mirror and saw only disappointment – in fact, she rarely looked at herself in the mirror here. What was the point? All the girls had abandoned their beauty regimens, if they had even practised one before the Selection; the rebels rarely had enough food for everyone, let alone the wherewithal to obtain cosmetics or skincare. Though Yue knew that Saran still found it a little stressful, particularly when a particular propagandist was around, she personally found it a little freeing – hair braided back, face washed, and ready for the day, pretty or ugly or whatever.

And anyway, it wasn't like the king had ever seen her like this.

"_Sahtein_!" said Agares, which was her version of Yue's mother's usual _itadakimasu_. The others echoed it, and began to eat. Yue had not even raised her fork to her mouth before Feste leapt to his feet, and barked, and raced for the backdoor, which was swinging open.

"Just us!" That was Vardi Tayna's familiar, husky voice. _Us_? Did that mean Demetri was here too?

Yue shook herself. It was probably Täj.

And it was.

Vardi Tayna held up her hands as she came round the corner into the kitchen, as though pleading mercy. She had her sleeves rolled up to her elbow. Not for the first time, Yue glimpsed the brand on her roommate's arm, a blackened remnant of what had once been a scar, or a burn: **Ꮬ**. "Sorry we're late for breakfast, auntie." She came around the table to kiss Agares on the cheek, and was quickly waved off with a _shchtu, your food will go cold. _Atiena scowled into her bread as the rebel dropped into the chair beside Yue, and Täj moved silently around the table to sit at the other end of the table. Yue caught Atiena's eye quite carefully, and the girl from Tammins cocked her head in that way that Yue knew meant _can you believe her_?

The freedom accorded to Vardi Tayna in Layeni was a source of some discord amongst the girls, Yue knew. She seemed to entirely disregard her curfew in favour of disappearing into the town and returning at her leisure. If she was anyone else, Yue wondered, would she have been eliminated by now? Was there a reason Demetri was keeping her?

Was that reason love?

Liara was looking at Täj. "You're bleeding."

He looked at her in that quick way of his, pale green eyes flicking up and away almost in the same motion. "It's nothing." His voice was very soft. Yue always forgot how deep it was, almost rusty from disuse.

Liara clearly had to bite her tongue to hold back from saying more. Vardi Tayna glanced between them, and then shrugged and reached for the teapot. Her hair was wet, Yue saw, despite the chill outside, lying in thin cold strands around her face. She was wearing a shirt that was too big for her; she had to keep pushing the sleeves back. Where her hair dripped on the fabric, it became translucent and showed her sharp collarbones, her body still vaguely gaunt despite the weeks of relative comfort and safety with Raphael.

"You were saying," Atiena was saying to Agares, clearly trying to move on from the whole interruption.

"Oh, yes. The Layeni town festival will be taking place next week. I think you'll all love it. It's the highlight of the calendar in these parts – dancing and contests and shows and such. Raphael talked Wick into advancing us a little more of her war pension this week, so we can go out and get some material to make you new dresses, if you like – or a nice new jacket," Agares added, looking at Atiena with a smile. "It's traditionally thought of as a lover's festival, so there's always such a wonderful atmosphere. A lot of people get engaged – like Raphael and I."

"The most cliché thing we've ever done," Raphael said ruefully.

"Oh, we knew we were going to get married _long _before then. We just had to get some nice rings and actually say the words." Agares smiled. "A little like actual marriage, then."

Yue could not deny she was oddly fascinated by the retired soldier and the watchmaker. They seemed to have the kind of relationship she had always dreamed of having – not like her parents, antagonistic and competitive and proud, but comfortable and sweet and thoughtful without needing to think. They seemed to understand one another without speaking; she had often seen Raphael hand her wife the tool she needed without being asked, or Agares know exactly when Raphael would need another cup of coffee and some time to herself. It was such a symbiotic, and yet oddly independent dynamic. Yue wondered if all rebellion relationships were like this by sheer necessity. Surely this was the kind of marriage that Demetri was setting out to accomplish.

"That sounds lovely," she said. "But please, don't go to any expense on our part."

Atiena nodded in agreement, and Raphael waved off this concern. "Nonsense. We love having you here, and you deserve to enjoy yourselves. Anyway, gifts are traditional. We won't have our girls looking drab next to the rest of eligible Layeni."

Liara looked away from Täj, at Atiena. "I need to send a letter to my mother. Can you come with me to Field Marshal Uzokuwa's? He seems to like you, and I want to see if I can get away with him censoring as little as possible."

In any other room in the rebellion, Yue knew, the idea of Liara, scion of Angeles, the dread king Mordred's childhood friend, the traitor-in-the-making, trying to send a letter and avoid censorships would have produced blades and venomous words. Instead, Raphael laughed and just said, "make sure he strikes out any mention of my cooking", and Agares playfully swatted at her wife, and Vardi Tayna pushed away from the table and said, "you'll have to excuse me" and no one did bother to excuse her as she disappeared back up the stairs and Täj, seeming rather heedless of the dirty look that Agares was shooting him, produced a cigarette and was about to light it when Atiena said "smoking _outside_, Täj, how many times do we have to say" and he shrugged and turned up his collar and called for the dog as he left and Liara watched him go, turning her letter over and over in her hands.

"Yue," Agares said, producing a scrawled list from her pocket. "Would you mind…? I'm a bit behind on a repair for the Zhangs."

Yue nodded. "Of course!" Truth be told, she loved to be left to her own devices in the little town of Layeni, especially in the mornings, when it still seemed half-slumbering. She could move at her own pace, and look all around her, and wonder at each little life at play behind each brightly painted door and shutter. How strange to think that every single person in this village had heartsickness of their own, had lived through a rebellion and claimed their lives back, and yet still had to rise in the mornings, still had to brew the tea and bake the bread. She was still totally, irrevocably fascinated by it all.

She ran upstairs only to put a ribbon in her hair and hold it back, and pull on the jacket borrowed from Agares, with the Arabic letters stitched over the heart. Vardi Tayna was sitting on her bed, playing music -_ t__rue or false, it may be __but s__he's still out to get me__ –_ and produced a pen to add a few requests on the bottom of the list in neat, clipped handwriting that looked like she had learned to produce latin letters as an adult, and still had to think about where each line went. As Yue picked up the list, Vardi said, "your hair is a little crooked, come here", and Yue sat down on the edge of the bed as Vardi carefully unpicked her ribbon, laced it through her fingers like a cat's cradle, and began to neatly braid Yue's hair again with a quickness and gentleness that seemed entirely foreign to the little sharp rebel. "If aneurysm was a colour, this would be it," she added, and just like that, the spell was broken, and Yue laughed lightly.

"Thanks, Vardi."

She shrugged and fell back against her pillows. "What? It's such an ugly purple."

"I like it."

"Exactly."

Yue tucked her list into her hand, and went downstairs, still smiling slightly. The pale man was at the base of the stairs, stepping in after his cigarette, and he looked at the list as well and asked politely for more asafoetida. Yue still wasn't sure to make of Täj, but despite how frightening and off-putting he had seemed at the beginning, she was beginning to realise he was not all that bad.

Liara and Atiena were waiting for her in the courtyard, Feste looking morose at the prospect of being left behind. Atiena put her hands in her pocket, and the three girls turned and walked out onto the street as one. Yue still missed Cor and Ekaitza – there was no one quite as sharp as Cor, no one quite as blunt as Ekaitza – but the quiet companionship accorded by the Angeles socialite and the Tammins rebel was nonetheless respite. They asked little of Yue; Yue could tell that they thought of her as a much younger, much more delicate girl, one who needed minding, one who would break easily.

She wished they were wrong.

They bid goodbye at the crossroads, and Atiena and Liara took the road out of town towards the soldier's encampment, where Uzokuwa and Wick spent most of their days doing whatever it was that soldiers did. Yue carried on along the winding cobbled street that linked the safehouse the town square. She dropped into the bakery, already all abustle with customers despite the relative youth of the day, the air within and without fragrant with the scent of fresh bread, its warmth almost palpable even from the street and overwhelming once you stepped inside. The tiny old woman working the counter knew Yue by now, and called a greeting, and told her assistant to hurry up and get the bread ready for the future queen of Illéa, which was the same joke she made every single morning and which nonetheless always made Yue laugh. She stepped outside and wrapped the bag tightly inside her jacket, as she hurried past the library, still closed, its windows shuttered with its blue volet brightly painted with tiny white and yellow daisies. She had begun to spend many of her lazy afternoons in its depths, working steadily through its collections of poetry and love stories, joined occasionally by Saran who preferred to sort through the glossy magazines on the bottom floor, all of them saved from about a dozen years ago and badly out of date. She walked past the doctor's clinic where Raphael worked four times a week, its shutters covered in geometric designs in red and dark purple, an asklepian drawn in broad, clumsy strokes by a child with more enthusiasm than talent, stretched between the two like a bar holding the windows shut. Some of the children had signed their windows - she could still see their smudged initials by the hinges.

At dusk, Yue knew by now, when all the shops were closed, the town was much brighter and more colourful than it ever was during the day. But Yue liked the quiet serenity of the morning. The shops were started to flutter open now, in a wave down the street, just as the gaslight lamps that had lit the night were beginning to die, one by one, almost as though Yue herself were dousing them simply by walking past.

As she reacheed the square, she saw that men and women of the village and the surrounding territories were starting to set up their stalls for that morning's market, fruit spilling across table, fish lying dead-eyed and staring in heaps, books heaped high with pages sticking out at every point. She loved, on quiet mornings, to browse the stalls, to move peaceably from place to place and see all that there was on offer. Here was a stall selling messages from the dead and a stall selling body armour and a stall selling fresh-brewed _salep _and freshly-baked _baklava_. Yue passed by the clocktower, and began her shopping as she always did, moving south to north as though she intended to go home.

It was always the same young man working at the fish stall on Friday mornings, tall and lean and dark-haired and what Saran called boyishly handsome. His name was Kün, and Yue knew that, just like Täj, just like many of the market's merchants, he was, or had been, an Anchorite, part of that small community of isolationists who had called the Wastelands home almost since the time that Illéa had been founded. Before the rebellion began, it was where those unhappy with the totalitarian Illéan regime would flee to find some semblance of freedom; after the rebellion, they had become the first civilians of the Kingdom in Exile, totally unlinked to the fighting, but beginning the difficult work of forming some normalcy in the carnage left behind.

"Lady Yue." He had already prepared her usual order, she saw, or rather, Agares' usual, the salmon and the catfish and the walleye, neatly butchered, and he set it gently on the counter in front of him and waved away her coins as she held them out. Yue frowned, and Kün hastened to explain, "oh, don't… I won't… no money today, Lady Yue." He smiled. He had a very even smile – not like Demetri's, which was always a little higher on one side, always a little crooked despite the polish of the rest of his appearance.

Yue blushed. "Oh, no. Please, let me pay."

He shook his head, looking abruptly shy. "Don't worry about. It's been taken care of."

She picked up the bag. "I don't want anything for free."

Kün said, "gifts are usually free, Lady Yue."

"A gift?" What she really wanted to say was, _fish? _

He looked shy again, and turned away, and a wave of shyness abruptly overtook Yue as well so she just said, "thank you very very much, Kün," and hastened away before she could make too much of a fool of herself.

When she got back to Raphael's, there was another book lying on her bed, another note tucked inside. She had to smile all over again at the message enclosed.

__My dearest, Yue -__

__I haven't had as much time to read as I had hoped, but so far I am happy to give you credit for how well chosen this particular book seems to be. Happy endings indeed – it seems impossible at this late juncture, with the lovers separated and he at war and she betrothed to another, that there shall be any kind of a conclusion which is not tragic, but I shall take you at your word, and persist, and hope for the best. Tragedy suits me, anyho____w. __

__This one – well, I'm not really sure yet myself if I enjoyed it. It's based somewhat on the Ephesian Tale of Anthia and Habrocomes, which was a kind of Hellenized Shakespeare screwball comedy and adventure, all love triangles and mix-ups and mistaken identities. Much lighter fare than either of us seem to be used to, but sometimes a little levity is needed in this world.__

__Let me know what you think of it?____ Clearly I need some help making up my own mind. __

__With ____sincere and enduring____ affection, __

__Demetri__


	19. Come Wander With Me

**Chapter Nineteen: Come Wander With Me**

* * *

_Oh but you, you always said, "You're just too good a ship to wreck."_  
_You said, "Never mind nothin', there's a summertime humming."_  
\- Brian Fallon

* * *

Lissa Dove was missing.

That was the main topic of conversation at the orphanage. The girl from Likely had not been seen in four days now, had dissipated into the ether like so much gossamer-fine fog, and with her vanishing, a thousand rumours had swelled forth to fill the void that her absence had left behind. It would have been simplest to assume a quiet elimination, a planned departure, a realisation that she had little chance of victory at this late stage of the Selection and a gregarious, graceful bowing-out before she was forced out in a more public manner… and yet, none of that really rang true to anyone who knew Lissa the way that the people of Layeni orphanage had grown to know her over the past few weeks. Had she eloped with a pretty young rebel with hair as dark as Lissa's was blonde? Or maybe she had been uncovered as a mole within the Kingdom in Exile and fled north back to the safety of Mordred's protection. Or, as Saran had heard only the night before, maybe she had been murdered by a Crown assassin, one of the many supposed to have infiltrated the rebel provinces and the Wastelands with the intention to make an example out of the girls who had joined the Selection.

A dozen stories, a hundred theories, a thousand wild ideas, and yet one singular truth that Saran could perceive – and that was that Lissa Dove was, quite simply, gone. She had not vanished in the night; Saran had gone out with the children for the day, and Lissa had gone to the market, and Saran had returned, the children had returned, and Lissa had not.

They had begun to dredge the rivers for a body.

Saran dealt with her emotions neatly. She always had – she wasn't sure whether it was a legacy of her Mongolian heritage, or just an element of her naturally efficient personality. If she was upset, she allowed herself to be upset, processed her feelings as quickly as possible so that she could get back to the things that were important. And the thing that seemed the most important to her now was this: Lissa was missing.

She had always known that a rebel Selection would be just that: in itself, an act of rebellion. The dangers had been acknowledged, emphasised, accepted. And yet this – not an explosion, not an air-raid, not a battle, just a quiet disappearing in the daylight – this unnerved Saran greater than any bloody massacre in the open might have done. It seemed so _wrong _that a person might be there and then gone, and that the rebels seem as frustrated and clueless as she, and that there be no signs, no traces left in the wake of Lissa Dove… or her body.

Saran wasn't sure why she thought Lissa was dead. It was simple intuition, a feeling like a knotted thorn behind her heart. She could not dislodge it. It was a sinking, certain feeling. She trusted it.

Wick had left her a box of tea that morning. She had found it sitting on one of the low wooden benches that lined the long tables at which the children were fed their breakfasts and lunches every day. There had been a note pinned to it, but where Saran knew that Yue received short missives from the prince wishing her well and discussing whatever little book he had sent her, Wick's note was almost desultory –

_S.A._

_for sleep_

_W.H._

Nonetheless, Saran was grateful. She was not in a position to be otherwise. It was a Kazakh brand of tea, she saw, meant to relieve stress, and she wondered if Wick had guessed that the disappearance of her companion had caused her long and sleepless nights, or if that fact was growing readily apparent on her face after so many days of exhaustion. She was glad that Demetri – and Wick, if she was honest – was not here to see her these days. She looked positively ghoulish, on the few occasions she caught sight of her own face in the mirror, all deep shadows and new hollows and even a few worry lines creasing the otherwise smooth skin beside her eyes.

She was brewing some of that tea when there was a knock on the door and the mistress of the orphanage put her head around the door to say that Saran had a visitor and would she be willing to see her? Saran nodded, and thanked her, and brewed a second cup of tea for her guest, expecting Yue or even maybe Cor to appear around the door.

To her surprise, it was not another member of the Selected, or even a member of the Inner Circle. It was the Warden of the North, Devery Atiqtalaaq, who had paid Saran a visit here all those long days ago when she had first arrived at the orphanage. Saran was struck yet again by the plain handsomeness of Devery's face, the energy in her bright brown eyes, the precision with which she bound her hair in twin braids. There was still that superficial, immediate resemblance to Saran's övöö, but Bataar would never smile at Saran so gently or reach for her arms with such a tender touch. She was still wearing clothes with a slightly northern flair - her coat lined with fur, her sleeves reaching past her fingertips, a woollen scarf wrapped around her head like a shawl, as though she had come straight from travelling to see Saran, without even pausing to change.

"_Amar mend üü_, Lady? Are you safe and happy?" Saran was grateful again for Devery's willingness to perform the _zolgolt, _the traditional greeting of the steppes, as familiar and comfortable as the embrace of a loved one. The two northern women grasped each other by the elbow, and leaned in to touch their cheeks to one another - Devery still smelled like the north, Saran thought distantly, of the Yukon river and cotton grass and green tea. It was another jolt of familiarity in a week that had been decidedly void of such comforts.

"_Tiim shüü_, Warden, I have been safe and happy." It was a lie. They both knew it.

They stepped back from one another and Devery gestured to ask for a seat on the bed that had belonged to Lissa. Saran nodded, and Devery sank down into her seat and accepted her cup of tea with a smile and a murmured _bayarlalaa._

"Is there any occasion for your visit, Warden?"

Devery smiled sadly. "I wanted to check in on you, Miss Altai. See that you're coping with this unexpected complication with all the strength I know you are known for. Miss Dove's disappearance has been quite the shock to the whole High Command, myself included. Adminster Givre has asked me to give you his personal assurances that we will not rest until we have discovered what happened here… and to ask that you maintain a certain degree of discretion for the time being."

Saran frowned. "You want me to keep this a secret?"

"_They _want to avoid panic." Devery was disassociating herself from High Command – did she disapprove of this request? Saran found herself trying to analyse the Warden's expressions closely.

Saran shrugged. "It's discomfiting for sure," she allowed herself to say, quite slowly as though turning each word over. "But… you know, I am sure Lissa will be found shortly." Devery nodded. "So there isn't use worrying anyone, I suppose."

"Indeed." Devery flashed a brief look of appreciation, and took a deep sip of her tea before she continued. "Now, Miss Altai, I must confess I had ulterior motives in volunteering to convey this message, and again I must rely on your discretion."

Saran found herself leaning forward in her seat, curiosity swallowing her thoughts whole.

"The truth of the matter is that the Elite has been formed." Devery almost laughed at the expression of shock on Saran's face. "It's true. Miss Delrío was removed from the Selection a week ago. Miss MacIntyre has asked to leave the Selection for personal reasons. Miss Rouen has been eliminated..."

"_Cor_?" Saran shook her head. She had always presumed Cor would last til the end, if only for the reason that she seemed too intimidating to ever be the sort of girl who could be told to leave. "Really? When?"

"Last night. Again, this is highly confidential."

Saran furrowed her brow. "Does the king know you're telling me this?"

Devery set her teacup on the dresser. It made a decisive _click _as she set it down. "Saran."

"He doesn't, does he?"

"You are of the north, as I am. I speak to you as I would confide to family."

"I'm not of the north," Saran said, almost automatically. And she wasn't, not really. She had put down no roots in Yukon, had left no bones in its soil. She still belonged over the sea, under the same sky, yes, but on different earth, on the Altai mountains, with her family.

"But you _know _it. As intimately as one who has tethered themselves there with blood and heritage and buried bones."

"So I am one of… ten remaining?" _The Elite. _It had seemed so impossible at the beginning, such a lofty ambition, so far from her grip. She tried to tally the other girls in her head, the ones that might remain – Atiena, Yue, Liara, Vardi Tayna, Eden, Marjorie, Liz, Nina, Lissa…

And Saran.

Ten?

No. Lissa was gone. Nine.

The Elite.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Do you remember my words the last time that we met?"

_This is not a competition for a heart but for a crown. And with a crown comes a people. A people who must be protected. At night, I pray that our queen shall be of the north. I have faith that I will not have to beseech you to think of Yukon, and Whites, and Baffins, and Hansport, as I know I will have to plead with any queen from the south._

She had spoken like she thought Saran had a chance, and Saran remembered thinking that conversations like this should wait until the Elite had been chosen, the field narrowed, the shortlist formed. She could remember wondering if Devery knew something that Saran didn't, or if she was merely hedging her bets.

Saran said, "Warden, I appreciate your apprehensions. But..." She sighed. "I have not had the… _honour _of any direct contact with the king. I fear the chances of my victory are inordinately slim. In truth, I have no idea why I remain in the competition – Demetri spends so little time with _any _of us."

Dangerously close to speaking ill of the king, but Devery's eyes were sympathetic. "Indeed. But, Saran, the role of a Selected is passive. The role of a queen is _not_. And as a member of the Elite, you are much closer to one than the other, are you not?"

"What are you saying?"

"If you want to become queen, _act like it._"

Saran could not help but think of long-ago days of youth, playing in the garden with Qadan and Naran, pretending to be khans and climbing bodily onto whatever little pony strayed close enough to them to play folk hero and charge back and forth across the hilly plateau on which their house was set, practising their archery with the clumsiness of children. To be a khan had merely been to tell her older brother what to do, and wrap yourself in fur, and stand on the highest branch of the tree. This… this was decidedly more complicated.

"Seems a tactic for getting myself into trouble," she murmured.

"There are people in the north languishing in our new Kingdom while these southerners busy themselves with expansion. What is the point of gaining more land if we can't keep it and protect our people?" Devery reached a hand across to touch Saran's. "You have cared and contributed wonderfully to the children of this orphanage while staying here, as a queen cares and contributes to her citizens. Do not think that has gone unnoticed. If Demetri has not _met _you, then he has certainly _observed _you. And, more importantly, so has High Command."

Saran said, "is that a good thing?"

And Devery replied, "that depends. Are you sure that you want to win?"

* * *

Marjorie was not quite sure of the correct response when dinner that evening proved to be Chinese takeout in white cartons, like they were back in Clermont with all of the beautiful conveniences of modern life in the Crown territories. Nor was she sure of exactly how one should behave when said white carton was proffered by Thiago Wesick himself, still dressed in the coat he claimed to have stolen from the corpse of Trajan himself, the shadow of hard work cast over his whole appearance, visible in the bags under his eyes and scruff of stubble on his jaw.

"I hope you like _l__aziji_," Thiago said, his voice sounding rusty like he had not put it to use in many long hours. "It was all I could grab after Anzu got through with the meal."

Marjorie hoped it wasn't obvious that she was angling her notebook away from the spymaster, though she was grateful that for once she had not included in her diaries anything which was liable to get her into too much trouble, should Thiago or Demetri ever get a look at it. She had come out here, to the iron fence surrounding their hotel headquarters, not for privacy but to soak in the last few rays of a slowly sinking sun.

"I'll eat pretty much anything," she said with some honesty, and accepted the food with a smile and a nod of thanks. To her surprise, Thiago did not move away, but gestured as though to ask if he could take a seat next to her, and, when Marjorie put up no protest, the spymaster sank down into a seat on the ground next to her. It was such a decidedly… _ordinary _look for a man with whom Marjorie had learned to associate a considerable deal of respect and a healthy degree of fear. For his part, Thiago didn't seem to find anything too unusual about the situation, for he set about immediately digging into his food with his chopsticks, and gazing at the hotel with the faraway expression of one who has left the office but hasn't quite left the work behind.

Marjorie watched him silently for a few moments, unsure about what was going on, and then just as quickly she realised that staring at him was highly unlikely to win her any favours, and she focused on her food instead. _L__aziji _proved to be some kind of chilli chicken laced with ginger, fragrant and tasty, made with enough skill that she wondered which of the rebels could take credit for it. Even if it hadn't, Marjorie had learned since those first lonely, strange days in the Wasteland safehouse that a picky palette simply wasn't something the rebels were willing to contend with.

"How was your day?" Thiago said quietly.

"Not bad." Marjorie wasn't sure how she could explain how monotonous her days had become, how every hour repeated the last, how she was not permitted to leave the grounds and so spent her afternoons pacing and trying hard not to think about the tunnels extending deep and far underneath the land. She wondered if this was what Thiago was here to confront her about – how she and Cor had snuck into the tunnels yesterday to explore, and fled before they were caught. Was he about to tell her she had been eliminated? Or worse? After all, Cor had not come out of her room today. What was to say Cor was even still _in _her room? Marjorie said, quite wryly, "how was yours?"

"Busy." Thiago shrugged. "The Kingdom has over a thousand informers across all of Illéa. When each of those provide you with even a single piece of information, even every week… well, that's a lot to try and get through. And our people do a lot better than one report once a week. A _lot _better."

"Surely you have people to help?"

"Not enough."

They dug into their food again, Marjorie's mind still spinning slightly, as though she found herself now engaged in a chess game with the spymaster and needed to make sure she did not inadvertently move any of her pieces into danger while she was focused on protecting her king piece. Thiago seemed hungry, but he ate at a remarkedly restrained speed nonetheless, almost as though he were keeping pace with Marjorie for the sake of putting her more at ease. It was almost as though he radiated cold, Marjorie thought. It was impossible to relax when he was sitting next to her.

Then he spoke again. "You're a smart girl." Thiago reached into the dead king's coat and pulled out a notebook. One of Marjorie's. The Selected girl barely managed to hold back the sudden intake of breathe at the sight of her precious treasure trove of information in the hands of someone who – while not an enemy – was not entirely a friend either. This was the black one, the one that she had brought with her from Clermont in the first place, the one she had filled up with all of her initial observations around the safehouse, her first meetings with Demetri, with the rebels. "You know, my day would have been less busy if I didn't have to spend an hour or two decoding this."

"Decoding?" Marjorie stared into her takeout box. She blanched. "An _hour _or two?"

Thiago slid open the book, and began to flick through the pages – endless lines of broad swipes of ink, not appearing to form any legible letters or words. "Munson shorthand, right?"

Marjorie nodded, still unable to shake her surprise at just how _easily _he had done it. "Uh… yeah, Munson. Well, mostly."

"Thought I saw some parts in Eclectic-Cross as well. Took me longer than I'm willing to admit to realise that you'd pushed a lot of the words through Spanish first, made the whole phonetic system much harder to decipher. Mix it up with a bit more irregularity in future – establishing any kind of pattern is basically asking to be cracked."

"You did all that in an hour?" Marjorie wasn't sure if that said more about how poorly she had encoded her notes, or about how efficiently and effectively Thiago Wesick worked.

"It was my pleasure. I appreciate talent."

Marjorie glanced at him in surprise. Certainly not the tone she had expected this conversation to take. "Talent?"

"For observation. For… calculated deduction. For secrecy." He met her eyes. "Oh, secrecy is a talent just like any other."

Marjorie said, "I suppose you're going to confiscate those?"

Thiago shrugged. "By rights, I should burn them all. Probably inform Demetri so he can kick you out of the Selection. Possibly throw you in the tunnels to make sure you don't carry any of our secrets back to Mordred."

"_Should_?"

"Like I said. You're a smart girl. And we're short on people. Especially _smart _people." Thiago tucked her notebook back into his coat. "You know, Corvina Rouen was eliminated from the Selection last night. Demetri sent her home to Sonage without even letting her say goodbye. I imagine, sequestered up here like this, without any company, without anything to do, a smart girl like you… well, not long before you start getting bored. A member of the Elite without a king to impress."

Marjorie spun her pen across her fingers. She resisted the urge to say that she was already bored. She resisted the urge to ask why Cor had been eliminated. She resisted the urge to ask why she _hadn't _been.

"As I said," Thiago said. "We're short on people."

"You want me to be your…. assistant?"

"Assistant. Apprentice. Accomplice."

Marjorie stared down at the pages in front of her. "And what do I get?"

Thiago shrugged. "Let's see how good of a job you do first. _Eso parece sensato, no?_"

"_No puedo estar en desacuerdo_," Marjorie admitted begrudgingly. She couldn't disagree that it seemed sensible. She couldn't deny it was entirely not the way she expected this conversation to have gone.

And they returned to their food, spymaster and Selected, as the sun sank slowly, spreading scarlet across scrubland.

* * *

"What are you _smoking_?"

Vardi Tayna looked at him with her eyebrow raised. "Are you asking literally, _demusha_?"

She handed him her carefully rolled joint – not pure hash, Täj could see, but spliced with the herb that rebels in the Wasteland called _metzliaxitia_, its bitter taste immediately apparent in the acrid smoke which surrounded Tayna like a mourning shroud. She had long ago weaned off those other drugs upon which she had been in the habit of imbibing, back when they were young, back when she had first earned her brand, back when she was still Yenifer, but occasionally she slipped. Very occasionally, she slipped. Täj thought she had slipped now. Her pupils were dilated wider than they should have been, given the light on the balcony. She was on the window seat and swaying slightly to the soft strains of the record she had put on, quiet enough that they wouldn't bother the sleeping Yue in the room above.

_They set me on fire and I did a lot of burning__, t__old me I didn't know things I thought I knew for certain…__._

He put it to his lips and took a drag.

Vardi Tayna was wearing a tank-top, for once. It bared her clavicle. It bared her arms. It bared the brand which was still visible there: Ꮬ. Big and black and bold, edges still turned inwards on themselves like they were still burning. In the dim glow of the street lights below, it seemed even larger than it usually did, even more noticeable. For all that Tayna claimed to owe loyalty to no-one and nothing but herself and her own interests, Täj thought, it was cruelly ironic that she bore such a clear sign of… well, _allegiance _wasn't a good word for what it had been.

He passed it back to her. The glow as she inhaled lit up only the curve of her lips, the blunt edges of her nails. She passed it back to him, tipped her head back and exhaled like she was breathing out with it all of her sins and regrets and burdens. As though a single breath could hope to alleviate all the wrong that she had wrought. You could, of course, say the very same thing about Täj. About Demetri. Their hands weren't just dirty. They were drenched in blood. Red soaking along every tiny pore, sinking deep into the lines of their knuckles, painting their nails like polish.

They still hadn't spoken about the other night. They didn't have to. Theirs was the silent communication of those who did not need words or even eye contact to comprehend one another, the perfect understanding of… well, Uzohola had called them soulmates once. Täj didn't think he agreed with that designation. That made it sound like it had been fate that he had met the little feral girl in those wastes all those years ago. Fate and destiny and serendipity, rather than a long series of terrible choices and fateful mistakes and selfish decisions and desperate attempts at survival in a bad situation.

_And now the wind's getting colder and the night's getting cruel__, __b__ut I don't mind, I don't mind if I'm with you__..._

There was a knock on the door. Täj went to the door to answer it, expecting it to be Raphael or Agares, some notice of tomorrow's schedule or a message from Demetri, but instead found it was –

It was Liara Lee.

In the gloom of the dim light, her features were softened greatly from their usual harsh edge. It made her skin seem to glow slightly, accentuated the shadows in the hollows of her cheekbones, the inky gloss of her hair. She was still dressed, like she had waited for Atiena to fall asleep before slipping upstairs. She looked young again, like the little girl who had played with Demetri in the palace gardens, held Mordred's hands for all of the precocious photos at formal events, sat on Ysabel's lap at the end of state dinners when she couldn't keep her head aloft under her own power.

Liara held up a tray holding two cups of oolong tea and said, her voice soft and yet maintaining a certain aloofness that made it sound like she was doing _him _a favour, "I heard music. Just wondering if…?"

She seemed to realise, rather abruptly, that Täj wasn't wearing a shirt, and blinked. He could feel her eyes on the jagged black scar that marked his collarbone and throat, as physical and real as a caress. He could remember her looking at it the same way, that night on the rooftop. He didn't mind – not just because it was Liara, but because it was not something, like Tayna's brand, which carried any kind of stigma. There were no soldiers without scars, and Täj had earned his.

"Wondering?"

"If we could talk."

Täj cast a glance over his shoulder at Tayna, who seemed to be contemplating climbing out of the window to escape the whole situation. The record was still playing softly in the background: _I could swear __that__ I knew you before__,__ l__ike__ we were lovers in another life__, __o__r maybe we were only strangers __in the rain__..._

Liara would want to talk about the king, he thought. She would want to ask why he would not speak to her, would not revel in memories past, would not meet her gaze or bear her presence for longer than he must. Just as their conversation on the roof had been equal parts frustrating and cathartic for the Selected girl, Täj could tell that her curiosity had only grown and grown in her chest like a tumour.

And though Täj had answers, he did not think that Liara would like to hear any of them.

"Let's go for a walk instead," he said.

Liara's eyes were very dark indeed. She had inherited them from her mother. "Sure."

"Give me a moment."

He shut the door and pulled on a shirt; Tayna slipped from the window seat to the bed and under the covers as she had a thousand times when they were young. She said nothing, although he could feel that she was watching him as well. Eyes like daggers, that one. He didn't think he would ever fully get used to it, especially when she looked at him like _this_. Täj rather thought the sky could have shattered around her, shedding stars like so many dropped coins, threads of dying light unspooling in piles around her, and she still would not have looked away.

The last time she had looked at him like that, he had kissed her.

The first time she had looked at him like that, she had tried to kill him.

He stooped to kiss her on the top of her head. "Sleep well, T."

He could tell she was biting back some acrid comment, some cruel words, some sharp insult, but instead she just said, "enjoy your romantic walk, _demusha_."

"I'll do my best."

"Don't tell her anything that you shouldn't."

And again, Täj could only say, "I'll do my best."

* * *

The body was found at dawn on a Saturday morning, just as the sky was curdling into a new paleness at the edges of the sky. Her long, lean limbs were all askew, as though she had been dropped into her makeshift grave with absolutely no care or thought given to her peace in death. Her browned skin had grown pallid and shrunken in death, a gaunt face made more gaunt for lack of motion. Her sunken eyes lay open, open and staring, staring and empty and piercingly icy blue.

They had been called out to investigate what Farid had reported as a potential land-mine – a fresh heaping of newly turned soil, something explosive interred beneath the ground. The other rebels had hung back in small thickets of two or three, wary as the marshal and his lieutenants probed the earth with bayonets, swept metal detectors through the air, and called for shovels to be brought when no bomb was detected. The soldiers put to the new task with gusto, but it was a young man, Rhys, only sixteen, who first hacked into skin and flesh and bone and scrambled back with a shout for the marshal to come quickly. They had indeed found something explosive. Explosive, though, didn't necessarily mean _explosions_.

Someone had wanted this girl to be found, Farid had pointed out. This was a _warning_, and designed as such. The rebels knew every inch of the land around the bunkers. Any change was immediately detected and noted and investigated – it was as close to a headquarters as they had ever come, their one point of resistance against their nomadic traditions. So someone had planted this body here, and someone had expected it to be found, and now they had found her and Uzokuwa wasn't sure who or why or what lay ahead.

He would have to step carefully.

He wondered what the theories would be. Would they consider this a message from one of the other Selected? Not unheard of, in the old stories, to eliminate a rival in as bloody a manner as possible. Or maybe

"_Ngiyaxolisa_," Uzokuwa murmured under his breath in a barely-uttered curse. "_Awukufanele lokhu. _I wish it was _me_ in that bloody grave." He turned to his men. "Bring her up carefully. She will never be our queen, but she was our comrade."

They would burn her, he had decided. Burn her, as they would burn any rebel. For she _had _been a rebel, one of the truest devotees to the cause amongst the whole of the Selection. And though she would never see a free Illéa, Uzokuwa would see to it that her name was added to the roster of the martyrs, and her name placed on the walls of the palace in Angeles when they retook the capital. It was the very least they could offer this poor, broken carcass of what had once been a strong, stoic, capable young woman. It was the very least that he could do.

"I will inform Demetri," he added. "Keep this a secret until I have told you otherwise."

The men probably didn't need his words. They had known her also, known her and liked her and shared with her their troubles and their thoughts. When they knelt by the grave to pull her from the tangled grasp of the roots which entangled her, it was with a certain reverence that they hoisted the corpse and carried her back out into the sunlight.

Even in death, Nina Alexandra Novak had a certain powerful presence about her.


	20. II: the heir of all my minutes

**II: the heir of all my minutes, the victim of every ramification**

_And now at my homecoming, the barked elms stand up like sticks along the street._  
_I am a foot taller than when I left, and cannot see the dirt at my feet._  
_Yet sometimes I catch my vague mind circling with a glazed eye_  
_for a name without a face, or a face without a name._

\- Robert Lowell

* * *

Yenifer and Demetri walked through the desert for what felt like days, but the sky never lightened or brightened or grew pale, so Demetri knew that it was still the same night that they had run away from the rebellion. Yenifer had stolen bottles of water from the commissary, and she doled them out judiciously when it looked like Demetri was flagging, refusing to cast away the empties and clutching them to her instead as another girl in another world might hold a ragdoll. In the dark, their shoes sometimes struggled to find purchase on the sand; they had only a waning moon to light their way, and Demetri could not shake the feeling that there were coyotes and wolves and wild things in the darkness waiting to pounce. If it hadn't been for Yenifer, he knew that he would have turned back hours ago, but the prospect of fleeing, of going _home_, of seeing Liara and Mordred and Set and Ysabel, was too tantalising to resist.

Anytime he tried to ask Yenifer how they were going to get back to Angeles, she shrugged it off like a shawl. "My brother's gonna help us," she said, once and then again. "My brother's gonna help us."

Demetri didn't ask how she had ended up with the General, if she had a brother to go back to. He especially didn't ask how she expected to find him, after so long in the General's custody. He didn't want to be told that she didn't have an answer.

They took only one break, which was when Yenifer handed Demetri the small amount of food that she had stolen, and waved away his attempts to share. It was bread, oddly salty, and a little dry, like it had been baked days ago and left out in the air to harden. Nonetheless, Demetri tore into it, and Yenifer turned her back on him to watch the stars, with the cold intent of one who has an important job to do.

"Thank you," Demetri said, and when she shrugged, he said, "no, really. Thank you."

"For what?"

"For helping me to get home."

She went quiet. "That's okay. Everyone should get to go home."

Demetri was quiet as well. She sounded sad. "Are you going to go home? Afterwards?"

She shook her head.

"Why not?" Demetri thought. "You don't want to? Or you can't?"

She smiled, softly. "Pick one."

"But you have a brother." He waited for her to nod, though she seemed a little hesitant. "He won't let you stay?"

She just stared at the tiny bits of bread that were still on the ground in front of him.

"Yenifer."

She looked at him.

"You can stay," Demetri said. "In the palace. When we get back. If you want."

In the moonlight, her eyes were very dark. "Stay?"

"Of course." He thought of how Ysabel had treated the baby bird that they had found in the garden, the one with the broken wing and the fluffy down, the one that she had carried carefully in cupped hands and fed with tweezers for a month until it was strong enough to fly again. Ysabel loved broken things - she loved to heal that which needed healing, and she loved to love that which needed loving. He thought he wouldn't even need to ask. Of course Yenifer could stay. She was just a child, just a small girl in a big wild feral world. "We're friends, aren't we?"

She looked dubious. "Friends?"

Demetri nodded. They had spent so much time together, him and her and Gabriel. Yenifer had never been very nice to him, but she would not stand for anyone else to be mean to him either. He wondered if maybe she was pretending not to know what a friend was, as she had before, when they were cooped up in the shipping container and he had called Liara his friend, and said he missed her. For so long, he had thought of Gabriel and Yenifer as pale facsimiles of what Demetri had known at the palace, like when Mordred had smashed one of Ysabel's best plates and Liara had snuck in one of Mrs Lee's finest china, as though the queen would not realise that the new replacement was of a different size and pattern. But Demetri was starting to think that it had been a cruel comparison to make in the first place. Yenifer was not Liara, or Mordred, but she was Yenifer - sharp and bold and slightly wild, but she had pulled Demetri up hills and given him all of her water and offered him a way home and looked after him, here and when they had been held by the General. Surely that meant that they were friends?

"Friends," he agreed, and Yenifer looked away before he could see her expression. He hoped she was smiling.

The sky was lightening when they reached the outskirts of the city. In the light, Demetri could make out better how tired Yenifer seemed, how bedraggled her hair, how dark her eyes. She had rolled up her sleeves earlier, when they had been forced to scramble up some sand dunes and press themselves low amongst the tough grass, because Demetri had heard cars coming. She had a red mark on her arm, shaped like this: **Ꮬ**. Demetri didn't think it was a tattoo. It looked like a scar, but he couldn't tell if it had been cut there, or if someone had burned it there. Not for the first time, he wondered about Yenifer. She had always seemed like she had just been borne from the Wastes, like she belonged to them the same way a wild fox or a coyote might. But she had a brother. Did she? Demetri's head was a little fuzzy. He was tired, he thought. It was hard to hold on to his thoughts.

She seemed to know where she was going once they reached the city. Or at least, it seemed like a city. There were no glass skyscrapers, like in Angeles – everything here was grey and black and smoky. The tallest structures were the slender chimneys that started to belch smog into the air once the sky lightened and the sun began to rise. The ground was muddy and unpaved, and the houses had iron bars over their windows and symbols painted on their doors, like they were trying to ward something away. Yenifer said, "we're nearly there" and Demetri said, "where is _there_" and Yenifer just shrugged and rolled down her sleeves like she was afraid one of the bow-backed men that they were passing would see it and shout at her for it. Demetri wasn't feeling very well. He wasn't sure if it was the smog or the long walk, but the world had begun to seem very pale, and he could feel his hands and legs shaking a little bit.

_There_ was a small, squat building. It didn't have bars over its windows; it had boards. The boards had the same letter on it: **Ꮬ**. Demetri wondered if that was Yenifer's family crest, like the one that was embroidered on all the napkins and cutlery in the palace that belonged to his family. Maybe that was what was on the front of all the houses. Maybe that was how she had known how to find her brother. She went up to the door, and knocked on the door, as hard as she could, which wasn't very hard at all, and shouted through the door something that sounded like "Arthur".

Her brother's name? The sound was wavering around Demetri, like he was listening to it through water. Had the bread been mouldy? Had the water been bad?

_"___Ya khochu uvidet' artura___,"_ she shouted.

She sounded tired, and a little proud of herself.

A shadow moved behind the window. Demetri could only see a tiny sliver of a person from between the boards, but something like fear settled over him. He took Yenifer's sleeve. "Maybe we should..."

The door swung open. A very tall and thin man stood on the threshold, with dark hair and very dark eyes. When Demetri tried to look up at him, black spots swum in front of his eyes. He said, "what?"

Yenifer pointed at Demetri and said, rather pointedly, "__eto prints demetriy___."_

Demetri didn't remember much after that. When he woke, he could feel that his arms had been twisted roughly behind him. There was a dull throb in his shoulder. He thought he might have slept on it funny, but as he began to take in his surroundings, he realised that his wrists had been tied together – and so had his ankles. He was sitting on a hard wooden chair. When he tried to open his eyes, he could tell that the darkness was the result of something tied over his eyes, or maybe a bag over his head. Yes, he thought. It was hard to breathe. Not impossible. They had not taped over his mouth.

He could feel his heart, almost beating through his shirt.

He should have stayed with the General.

The sound was muffled; he thought the people arguing must have been in the next room over. There was one voice, low and impatient. That was the thin man who had answered the door. And there was another voice, higher and angry.

"I know the bounty. I saw the price. I want the money."

"_Kakaya glupaya suka_. I don't owe you anything."

"Don't call me that. Give me my __fucking__ money, Artur."

Demetri strained to listen, hoping that they might say something - anything - that would help him. The rope was rubbing his wrists raw. He twisted his arms and legs, hoping that by some miracle his limbs would just slip free. Did they have anyone in the room watching him? What did they want with him? A ransom, maybe. He hoped. He knew that whatever it was, his Ysabel would pay it.

Or maybe they were just going to kill him.

"You know what? I'll let you in on a secret, little one. Everyone you ever meet is gonna try and take something from you. That's the way this works. They'll scrape away at your bones, drain your blood, cut a hole in you and try to fuck you through it. That's how this works, Yeni. That's how the world works."

Demetri hadn't known a girl his age could have a voice so cold. "You promised to give me money for him. You promised - "

"Promise isn't worth shit in this world."

"Bastard -"

"Listen, I know I told your sister I'd mind you -"

"Don't talk about my sister! You promised her you'd mind _her_, and you didn't! You didn't stop those _fucking_ soldiers from doing what they did -"

There was a sudden, sharp crack. Demetri flinched at the sound. The thin man had hit her. Artur now spoke low and intense.

"Children shouldn't run their mouths on something they know nothing bout."

Yeni's voice was defiant, but Demetri could tell she was speaking through restrained tears. "I know _all_ about it, you didikai bastard. I was there when they – when they carved her up, when they - "

"Then you know what I have planned for you if you stay." He sounded like he was starting to smile. "You were right to run, Yenifer. If you were smart, you would have stayed away."

"Nimue – "

Her words were cut off by a yelp. Demetri slumped back against his chair.

"Take her out back, Lance." Artur's voice was venomous. "She needs to be reminded." He sighed, but there was no sadness there. "The desert air always does tend to spoil cargo."

* * *

Over the days that followed, the bag was taken off Demetri's head for only two occasions: once, when a man came in to shave off his hair, leaving little blond curls littering the concrete ground around him, and then when it came time to feed him, when a brute-faced man with broad shoulders slapped a bowl of something grey in front of him. They would not untie him so that they could feed him; instead, Yenifer would come in and be told in that guttural language to help him eat. The first time Demetri saw her again, he saw that they had cut her hair and blackened her eye and given her two long cuts on her right cheek, perfectly parallel to one another, like they had been purposefully carved there. He was angry enough to think that she deserved it, and turned his head away, and would not acknowledge her until she dropped the spoon back into the bowl and walked back out of the room.

She came back once a day, always ushered back in by the same brute-faced man, always after an argument with someone in the next room over. After two days, Demetri was hungry enough to eat, but neither of them spoke, so stiffly did they move under the cold gaze of the guard at the other end of the room. Demetri wondered if they were feeding Yenifer. She looked smaller and dirtier each time that she appeared on the threshold.

At least, Demetri thought that it was once a day. There was no natural light in this space. He couldn't tell if it was day or night, how many days had gone by. He thought that Artur mustn't have asked for a ransom yet. If he had asked, he would have got his money already. Then he would have to let Demetri go. So he mustn't have asked yet.

Once, he tried to ask the guard what was happening, if his Ysabel knew where he was, how much longer he would be here for. The man responded as though Demetri had called him a nasty name – he rushed across the room, grabbed him by the neck, and began to hit him, in the face and in the torso. The chair tipped; the guard had kicked him in the ribs, hard enough that Demetri had felt a crack, and then backed up and called for _alena_. Demetri had lain there, his head spinning, his lungs burning, every bone hurting, until the guard had come back to haul up his chair. As well as food that evening, his ties had been loosened to let Yenifer bind up his ribs, and put a splint on his fingers. He had been surprised by how gentle her hands were. Her lip had burst; she had bruises on her arms in the shape of fingers. She had said to him, very softly, "stay strong, _demusha_".

After that, they hit and hurt him a lot more often. Demetri supposed that meant Artur hadn't got his money yet. He must have been angry. Yenifer wasn't let in to help him unless they broke something, or made him bleed very badly. His food portions got smaller, a little more infrequent.

Sometimes Artur came in as well. He always wore a waistcoat, or a shirt with braces, like he was always on his way to or from a formal meeting. He managed to make the ensemble look like a thug's uniform.. Maybe it was the sharp planes of his face, how hungry he always looked, the pallor in his skin and the darkness of his eyes and his hair. He would sit on the floor and order that Demetri's ties be loosened so that they could play a hand or two of cards, playing for nothing and winning nothing. Most of the time, Demetri struggled to even understand the rules. Artur would speak a little, ask Demetri if they had fed him, complain about the cargo or the clients, and address his guards in that guttural language of the wasteland brotherhood. Demetri thought this was the Gildas man's way of receiving progress reports, just as Trajan held audiences in the throne room.

Once, there was a battle outside. He could hear explosions, could hear shouting, could hear gunfire, and thought that it might be his father's forces come to get him, or maybe even the General looking for him, and in that moment he would take either. He started to shout, knowing that no one could hear him, and this time when the guard came back he knocked a tooth out of Demetri's head and put a needle in his arm and when Demetri woke up, he was lying flat and could feel the world moving around him. A truck, he thought. They had put him in a truck like livestock.

Yeni was there as well, looking pale and drawn. "They're going to kill us," she said, rather dazedly, and then, as though she had forgotten what she said the first time, "they're never going to let us die."

Demetri didn't want to talk to her. He forced himself upward and blinked black spots from his eyes. When Yenifer looked at him, he could see that someone had burned her cheek, an angry red scab stretching from eye to ear. It looked like someone had held her by the hair and put her face to a stove.

Something glinted in her hand. She had a piece of broken glass gripped tightly in her palm, so tightly that tiny rivulets of blood were streaming across the surface.

"I'm sorry, Demetri." Her voice was dull. "I'm sorry I didn't… help you. Like I should have."

Demetri just stared at her, and even a boy as young as he could have some idea of what she was considering.

"I'm sorry." Yeni didn't seem the type to cry, but her voice sounded thicker than usual now. "I know that doesn't mean much. But. I am sorry."

There was a small, spiked knot of anger in his chest, strangling his lungs, but he thought of Ysabel, and of his mother, and of his father, and what they would have told him to do. Forgive, his mother had always said, forgive. Forgiveness is more about you than the other person.

Well, he thought. His mother wasn't here.

"I don't care that Artur tricked you," he said. "But you shouldn't... don't do that." He was looking at the glass. "There's... you shouldn't. You don't deserve to die."

She ran her sleeve across her face. The piece of glass caught the light and seemed to wink at Demetri with malevolent promise. "He tricked me into giving you away rather than selling you."

That almost made him laugh.

"Okay," Demetri said. "You have a point." His own voice was sounding very cold now. Almost strangled. "Okay."

"Nothing about this," Yenifer said. "Is okay."

* * *

As it turned out, there was no need for a great escape. There came a day that Artur Gildas returned, and took the blindfold off Demetri, and told him, "we are going for a walk. And if you try to run, I will kill you."

And Demetri believed him, so out they went for a walk.

They were no longer in the barren, arid wastes, but a city - not a nice city, certainly, nothing compared to the glamour of Angeles. Artur pointed out buildings that he owned - and he was a rich man, to own so many, and a powerful man, judging by the number of people that scrambled to escape his path - and then when they came to a street vendor he said to Demetri, "order something," and with the threat still ringing in his ears, Demetri ordered something and Artur brought him to the canal where he sat and ate and watched the water churn in the wake of the speedboats moving up and down the street. After so long blinded and starved, being out in the light and permitted to eat made Demetri want to cry.

Artur said, "everything you have seen today belongs to me. This whole city belongs to me. Yenifer belongs to me. And _you_ belong to me. Like a pack of dogs."

Demetri had been silent.

"A disobedient dog gets tied in the yard. Gets beaten. Starved to make it hungry." Artur had crouched down beside Demetri, and the boy had found himself staring at the thin man's reflection in the rippling surface of the water rather than look him in the eye. "What do you think happens to obedient dogs, Demetri?"

Demetri had just looked out across the water. He couldn't escape the feeling that Artur was about to put a bullet in the back of his head and push him into the water. _Father_, he thought. _Ysabel. Set. Mordred. Liara._

"I'll put you back in the hole to think about that, shall I?"

Demetri could not help but clench his jaw.

"No?" Artur had smiled. "You have an answer already?" He pointed to some of the young lads on the other side of the canal, who were moving crates from a truck. Shaved heads. Tattoos, the same as Yenifer's brand, but placed more delicately, deliberately, less painfully. "Put it this way. You want to be _them_? Or..." He pointed into the canal. There was a shoe floating by, close enough for Demetri to stretch out a leg and touch it with his foot. "You want to be them?"

"That's not," Demetri said. "A real question."

Artur put a hand on Demetri's shoulder, and squeezed hard. "Now you're getting it, _demusha._"

* * *

He worked for Artur after that. Did you know that? Demetri worked for Artur for _years_. One, two, three years. After a while, he stopped missing his brother and his Liara. After a while, he stopped crying for his father and for his stepmother. After a while, he stopped dreaming that the General would find him. After a while, hunger and pain married in his marrow and became a new and constant companion, side-by-side with suspicion and savagery. One, two, three years, and maybe more, because really, who was counting at that point?

And he never told anyone how he escaped.

Oh, later on he told Gabriel some story about befriending the guard, convincing him to help him get home, and abandoning him at the Angeles border, slipping away into the crowd. Gabriel wouldn't believe him. Gabriel knew the cost had been greater than that.

But he did, finally, escape.

Not with Yenifer. Yenifer ran without him. He should have expected that, but it still sort of hurt, to hear that the little dark-haired girl had disappeared back into the Wastes. Artur had sent men after her, and they had come back saying that she was not to be found, not amongst the snakes and not amongst the coyotes, not amongst the rebels and not amongst the gangsters, not on the earth and not under it, not so far as they could tell.

No, Demetri escaped - at last - on his own.

* * *

With his shaved head and his blackened eye and the too-big shirt, he looked like any of the street kids that hung around the rebellion, offering to carry ammunition and supplies for a meagre allowance per day, to shine shoes and wash clothes, to do any small job that might garner warm food and a roof over their head. The city was big enough to support a meagre amount of traffic, and hanging around the intersections saw a number of cars come and go. Demetri hung around with dour eyes, watching closely, hoping that he might be able to find a civilian to hitch with, hoping he could do so before Artur realised he was gone.

The truck that rolled carefully up beside him shortly before dusk did not disgorge rebellion soldiers, or any of Artur's henchmen. Instead, the dust-encrusted window was rolled down, and a boy stuck his arm and head out, looking casual. He could not have been much older than Demetri, just in his early teens. "Easy there. You look like you've had a rough time of it." He cast his eyes across him, the bruises and wounds still etched deeply on his skin.

Demetri stared forward. "Yeah," he said laconically.

The boy smiled. "The name's Täj," he said, rather gregariously. He gestured in the direction. "You headed towards Pongoton? It's such a hot day. I can give you a ride, if you want."

Pongotown was a hub. Pongotown would have Crown forces. Pongotown might even have a commander stationed there, with a direct line to the king. "Sounds good."

"You got bags?"

"Nah."

He climbed in. They set off. Demetri was trying to remember if he had ever seen Täj before, hanging around any of Artur's warehouses. He could not see the **Ꮬ** symbol anywhere on his skin.

"What's your business in Pongotown?"

"Visiting my brother," Demetri said automatically. "Lee."

Täj didn't say anything for a little while, but Demetri could tell that he wasn't completely sold on this story.

"They have a checkpoint set up outside the city," Täj said, after a very long moment. "Just outside the city proper. You won't get through without papers."

Demetri's brow furrowed. "What makes you think I don't have papers?"

"Do you?"

His silence was answer enough.

Täj seemed to be trying to decide whether or not to trust him. "My little sister works at a diner just outside Pongotown," he said, finally. "I'm sure you can crash in the backroom for a few hours while I sort something out for you."

"Why would you help me?" What ulterior motive could he have? Would he try to sell Demetri, just as Yenifer had?

"Do you need help?"

"Why would you break the law for a stranger?"

Täj smiled to see the suspicion on Demetri's face. "We do not recognise the laws of the Crown or the Kingdom."

Demetri frowned. "You guys are Anchorites?"

Täj nodded. "My people have lived beyond Illéa since the damn kingdom was founded. This whole rebellion is just a nuisance, if you ask any of our elders. They've tried before and they'll try again, but the Crown is latched on to this land as tight as any parasite."

Parasite, thought Demetri.

"Tayna says that she sees more fake papers than real ones, where she works. I'm sure she can rustle something up for you. You seem like a kid in trouble. You should be allowed to get as far away from that trouble as you can."

Kindness? Demetri almost smiled. Well, he didn't trust it a damn bit. Even as Täj spoke, he eased his hand into his pocket and wrapped his hand around the butt of the revolver he had stolen from Artur, right before he ran.

He held it like he knew he might only get one shot off, if it came down to it.

* * *

And it was good that he did, because Yenifer pulled a gun on him when she saw him. She was behind the bar, cleaning glasses with an taller girl, and before Demetri could blink, he had his revolver pointed at her and she had a pistol aimed at him, and the boy who had introduced himself as Täj was shouting "_hey hey hey_" and the taller girlwas jumping back and throwing up her hands and shouting something in a language Demetri could not speak. Yenifer was calling Demetri a dog and Demetri was calling Yenifer something decidedly nastier, and all in all it took five minutes for either of them to lower their guns, and even then Demetri could sense that Yenifer was keeping her finger wrapped around the trigger, just behind the bartop, ready for a quick draw if it came down to it.

Täj knew better than to ask. He indicated Yenifer with a wave of his hand ("_you two seem to know each other_") and introduced the other girl behind the bar as his younger sister, Vardi Tayna, who was, Täj said, sure to be able to help them with papers. Tayna went away to rustle up some food for the small, angry boy in the doorway and Yenifer skulked along the staircase at the back of the bar, looking rather like a trapped rat, casting glares at Täj and Demetri alike.

There was some small part of Demetri glad to see that she was alive. There was a larger part of him glad to see that she was alive, because now he would get the chance to kill her.

Tayna returned with soup and a whole loaf of bread ("_don't eat to quickly or you'll split your stomach_") and let Demetri tear into it while Täj went to make enquiries about papers, good enough to get him to Angeles. Täj had been enlisted, Tayna explained, and fled; they were all fugitives here, in a way.

At that, Yenifer scowled and went into the backroom to move kegs around very noisily. Demetri burned his mouth on the soup and listened to Tayna sing off-key as she rearranged split bottles on the shelves. They didn't have a spare room, she told Demetri, and wouldn't have given him one if they had it, but later that night they put a blanket and a pillow into the storeroom, which was warm and smelled of fresh barley, and let Demetri settle there with the promise of escape in the morning.

He was unsurprised that Yenifer came to him in the night, unsurprised and somewhat gratified, but what did surprise him was that she wasn't carrying a knife when she did. The door swung open - light spilled in - and Yenifer came in, and sat down with her back to the wall, and said, "god, they broke you" and he said, "nice to see you too" and she said, "would you believe me if I told you I thought about going back for you?", and he said "no", and she said "every day and every night I thought about it", and he said, "can you even tell when you're lying anymore?" and she said, "ah, so you've learned", and handed him a bottle of whiskey she had stolen from the bar.

In the morning, Tayna came in with fresh-squeezed orange juice and more homemade bread, this time fresh from the oven and steaming into the crisp morning air when Demetri ripped it apart with his bare hands. She said, "there are royal patrols outside. Maybe best you stay hidden," and Demetri, still tasting liquor on his tongue and breath, had to bite back the easy response that a royal patrol was exactly what he was looking for. But they wouldn't recognise him like this, he reasoned. They wouldn't believe him if he claimed his own name.

Tayna shovelled eggs and bacon onto his plate with another warning note to split his stomach, and as she left, a vaguely hungover Yenifer made a sound like a dying thing and rolled over under the blanket to set her head against the cool concrete wall and say, "she didn't make _me _any breakfast."

Demetri flicked a bit of bacon at her. It hit her hair, and then the ground, and Yenifer was shameless about picking it up, flicking bits of dirt off, and eating it in one piece.

"You are disgusting."

"It's called survival, _demusha._"

It sounded like a curse, the way she said it, and indeed it may have been, for no sooner had she finished speaking than the door to the bar was kicked in and they heard Tayna screaming and soldiers ordering everyone out, out, out, into the square, _now_.

Survival indeed.

* * *

They separated the groups out into boys and girls, and Demetri was pulled away from Yenifer again, and he was about to shout for her when he saw the man patrolling along the lines and all thoughts of calling out utterly fell from his mind. Tall and broad-shouldered, bearing the epaulettes of general on a coat of the deepest moss green colour, this man had pale white-blonde hair and pale green eyes, like the colour of his coat filtered through ice. He had a mouth that Demetri was more accustomed to see turned up in a wry smile, and broad hands criss-crossed with scars that Demetri had spent hours tracing and of whose stories he had often been regaled, and, around his neck, the golden wedding ring that had belonged to King Trajan Dunin.

The golden ring that had belonged to his father.

A new gold ring glittered on his finger, however.

Jostled on all side by villagers, Demetri had to elbow his way through the crowd in an effort to get closer to the front, shouting for his uncle, but Set's gaze swept impatiently past him, and before Demetri could call out for a final time, he heard the commander speak simply and tersely. "Leave none alive."

* * *

Again, any time Demetri told this story, he stopped talking here. Most people realised the scar on his neck must have something to do with this memory, that he must have earned it in this time between the order and the aftermath, but no one ever dared ask.

That was another secret shared only between him and Yenifer, one of many. Whenever he spoke to Gabriel about it, the story skipped from _the order rang out_ straight to the next part, which always started, _I found Yeni in a mass grave, pretending to be dead_.

They both crawled out of a sort of damnation that day, and wound up sitting in debris, remembering abruptly that they were children and the world was large and there were scythes swinging.

"My uncle," Demetri said dazedly. "Set. He... they killed all those people."

Yenifer's face was small, and pale, and drawn, and unsurprised. "This is war, _demusha._"

Demetri thought of Uzohola, of Gabriel, of the other young boys and rebels that he had left behind in the Wastes. Would Set have murdered them just as coldly, with just as little care? "This is war," he echoed.

"We have to go." Yenifer was searching over her shoulder. Demetri wondered where Täj was. If he had got away. If Tayna had got away as well. If Set had murdered them all and dumped them all in the same mass grave, despite their kindness, despite their refusal to participate in any of this bloody madness. Was Täj already rotting beneath the earth? "We have to go."

"_We?"_

Yenifer nodded. Her fingers dug into his sleeve, very tightly. "_We_," she said firmly, and pulled Demetri from the ground like she was dragging him out of hell itself.

* * *

_And years later, when Ysabel asked Mordred how, how, how did he know that the false king was not his lost brother, he had to bite his tongue against spitting out the venomous words, about spilling out all the poison that he knew: that Set had murdered his nephew in a little dusty outpost in the Wasteland years ago, mistaking him for just another rebel in the wastes, and that Demetri was rotting under the earth somewhere, bones bleached, maggots in his chest and flowers growing from his skull. _

_No, Mordred kept that to himself._


	21. Just To Be Seen

**Chapter**** 20:**** Just To Be Seen**

* * *

_You taught me the courage of stars before you left, how light carries on endlessly, even after death  
With shortness of breath, you explained the infinite, how rare and beautiful it is to even exist  
_\- Ryan O'Neal

* * *

Over the weeks in the Selection, Atiena's hair had grown out into a natural style, a short crown of corkscrew curls, no longer cropped close in the pseudo-militarial style as she had worn it in Tammins. She was grateful that Uzohola had left her a silk wrap in which to wear her hair at night before the co-ordinator had departed Layeni, grateful for the gift and grateful also for the thought behind it, though she couldn't quite admit to herself whence that second sentiment stemmed.

In any case, she still wasn't quite used to how feminine her new hair made her, softer and younger than her twenty hardened years. Raphael's wife, Agares, wanted to put decorations into it for the Layeni festival, which was due to begin in four days, and Atiena wasn't quite sure she would have the heart to turn the sweet woman down. She couldn't shake the impression that there was something underlying the watchmaker's enthusiasm in helping the girls with the Selection, in making them look nice and arranging for them to spend time in the town with ordinary citizens and so on. More and more, Atiena was beginning to wonder if the different safehouses were themselves in competition – if Agares and Raphael were trying to prove something with their girls, by giving them the best chance.

Maybe she was being cynical. Maybe she had been too long parted from ordinary human kindness. Maybe she saw selfishness lurking where there was none.

On the other hand, maybe she was right.

She couldn't discount that possibility, after all.

And the other surprise, with her new, longer hair, was that she actually had to dedicate time to it, hours set aside to wash it. She remembered so little about her mother, the mother that had belonged to Atiena's before Atiena had belonged to Killmonger and the Morrises, but she remembered that when she was a child her mother had braided her hair, carefully, with deft fingers, tight cornrows along her scalp to keep it neat, as befitted a Four. She could not even recall the name that her mother had given her, but she remembered liking that the style exposed the heart-shaped shape of her face, made her look like more like her older brother, more sophisticated and older.

She remembered seeing his braids sway gently in the wind when Ysabel had ordered him hung from the walls of Tammins Fort. In that regard, her mother had been lucky. She had hidden Atiena in the closet (_quiet now, not even a peep, we're going to play a game_) and then she had been shot in the head. These were the truths that Atiena knew, so engrained in her psyche that she did not remember how she knew them.

For that reason, when Agares suggested braiding her hair, as Uzohola sometimes wore hers, Atiena had shot it down immediately. She was not a sentimental person, but there was no use in bringing up the past when they didn't need to.

Besides, she liked the way that the light filtered golden through her hair when the sun was sinking.

It was the first touch of vanity she had allowed herself in all of these fifteen years. The Selection was making her soft, clearly, Atiena thought with amusement. What would Maria say, if she saw her now?

This all flitted through her mind as she went through the routine that had rapidly become familiar during their long hours at Raphael's house, a little different from that of the delicate Yue or the refined Liara. After unwrapping her hair, and pulling open the curtains to see the sky was not yet light, Atiena set about her usual morning workout as quietly as she could, knowing now which floorboards creaked and how loud the sink was when she ran it to wash her face. She knew it wasn't much compared to the hardscrabble life on the run which was most familiar to the Morrises, but it was something to stop her from growing _too _soft. She had asked Raphael about finding her time on a range and a gun with which to keep her sharpshooting skills slick, and the Smetisko woman had promised to look into it, but Atiena did not have high hopes. The rebellion barely trusted the girls expected to marry the king to meet him for longer than ten minute bursts. She highly doubted they would trust her with a rifle.

But it didn't hurt to try.

She was in the courtyard, going through her usual exercises, when the dog that Täj called Vovve came out as usual as though to herd her into the house for breakfast. The wiry collie was probably Atiena's favourite part of this whole safehouse business, if only because he reminded her so strongly of her own hound, Midnight, left behind in Tammins – not so much in appearance, but in the slightly wounded way he approached the world, wary until he got to know you and then very desperate for love.

Atiena had heard that animals took after their masters, and didn't want to think too much about that at all.

So far, so routine, but this time Vovve had brought a friend with him – Atiena was extremely surprised to recognise King Demetri himself, dressed not in his usual fisherman's jumper but in a lightly padded shooting _jacket_ and canvas trousers. "Lady Atiena," he said. In this light, his hair seemed spun from gold. "I am sorry to intrude."

Atiena rose quite unhurriedly, brushing dirt from her knees and refusing to look apologetic for her current harried appearance or the sweat dripping off her back. He had walked in on her, not the other way around. She imagined Yue would have rather died of embarrassment if the king had seen her in only a sports bra and leggings. "Not intruding at all, Your Majesty."

There was a brief pause. She thought he was making an assessment about her. She couldn't remember if this was the first time they had spoken. She wondered if he was figuring out how to charm her best. It reminded her of how her adoptive brother, Daniel, looked at a lock when he wanted to pick it. Whatever he was thinking, it was apparent he had decided to drop the small talk. "Raphael mentioned you wanted access to a shooting range. I must admit it's been some time since I sharpened my own skills – I don't suppose you'd accompany me?"

Atiena cocked an eyebrow. "A date, sir?"

Demetri's eyes were a very dark green in the early morning light. "If you want it to be."

"And if I don't?"

"Would you have a reason not to?"

"Humour me," Atiena said, and was rewarded with a twitch of Demetri's mouth in response that suggested he was fighting the urge to smile, not out of amusement, but out of obligation.

"What would you like it to be?"

_An audition_, Atiena thought. The Morrises could only do so much in Tammins, as a single small militia. Here, where the action was, where she could make a difference – it had been her main reason for coming south in the first place. However, she only shrugged. "I suppose I can live with a date," she agreed, and fought back the little voice in her head that said _this will be your first date since Veronica_.

Demetri nodded. "I'm glad to hear that," he said, "though of course if you change your mind at any point, we can renegotiate." He glanced at his watch. "I'll let you change and get some breakfast – would you meet me at the crossroads in about a half hour? I need to get some things for Uzokuwa in town."

Atiena nodded, and could not help but think, as she watched him turn and walk away, that she might for the first time in this Selection not be sure of exactly what she could expect from the coming day.

But she did as he had told, though of course all he had told her to do was common bloody sense, she thought grimly, returning to the room she shared with Liara to dress quickly. The other girl's bed was vacant; no doubt she had already begun to prepare breakfast in the kitchen, according to routine, allowing Agares to finish up on that day's work – not repairing clocks, as usual, but preparing new dresses for the girls to wear to the Layeni Festival. Liara had been so touched by the gesture, and by the expense that their hosts were going to on their behalf, that she had gone to each of the girls separately to try and think of some gift they could give them in return. Liara had an odd need to be useful, Atiena thought, like she was desperate to shake the impression of a privileged Angeles brat. Truth be told, despite Atiena's settled hatred of the black widow Ysabel, she rather found herself liking Liara.

Breakfast that morning was typical: strips of cold salmon and quarters of hard-boiled eggs, an array of breads, some soft cheese, a bowl of yogurt and another bowl of mixed seeds and spices, _baozi _for Vardi Tayna and a pot of oolong tea for the pale rebel and a pot of coffee for Atiena and Raphael to share. The house always seemed so alive with creaking floorboards and shifting foundations and people in every room, that Atiena found it hard to miss the busy nature of Tammins, though the absence of the other Morrises throbbed in her chest like an open wound.

"Old Deacon says the river has frozen over," Raphael said, as she took her usual position at the head of the table. Her wife sat next to her, wearing a tawny headscarf and bandages on her fingers where she had pricked them sewing during the night. Atiena wasn't sure why these little indications of domesticity touched her so much, but she had to look away. "Just in time for the Festival."

Yue, though a former world champion in ice skating, did not look too happy to hear this news, but no one could ask her why before Agares called, "_Sahtein_!" as she always did.

"_Sahtein_," the others echoed, which Atiena had grown to understood meant something along the lines of _bon appetit _in Arabic, and they all dug in. The pale rebel was absent, which meant Liara had a whole pot of oolong to contend with on her own; Vardi Tayna was wolfing down _baozi_ like she thought the world was due to end in a minute-and-a-half. Yue picked carefully at her food, while Raphael looked around the table and said, "well, what are we up to today?"

Yue said, "Saran is bringing some of the orphans to pick berries on the far side of town, and invited me." Northern girls, Atiena thought, sticking together. She didn't quite fit into the established social strata of the Selection, at once a rebel and a midlander from occupied Illeá without the two seeming to co-exist peacefully. Maybe she and Liz or she and Nina could have forged some sort of bond through familiarity, like this, but Liz and Nina had both been assigned elsewhere. "If that's alright, Raphael?"

Raphael waved off the request. "More than fine, Yue, you don't need to worry."

Atiena jumped in then, before anyone else could answer. "The king has invited me to go shooting with him."

That silenced the general chatter in the room – out of the corner of her eye, she could tell that Liara had set down her fork, and Yue's eyes had gone large. Vardi Tayna's gaze flicked this way and that, taking in the tableau. Atiena hadn't realised it was _that _much of a surprise, but then, she supposed it was the first date the king had arranged in their time in Layeni.

"Well," Raphael said crisply. "That's lovely."

What was that tension in her voice? Atiena could not place it, but then, it was an open secret that Raphael had broken with the rebellion and the division had not been entirely healed, even if she had welcomed the Selection into her home. Maybe it was the drawing of this martial element into what ought to have been a romantic event that irked her?

Agares jumped in quickly to break the ice that had rapidly formed over the atmosphere. "Well, just make sure you are careful not to stand in the wrong place, Atiena. Our king has _terrible _aim at the best of times, if I remember correctly."

"You do," Vardi Tayna said with dark delight.

"I'll come back in one piece," Atiena reassured Agares, and that seemed to be that, although the breakfast that resumed was much more sombre than it had been before.

Rather to her surprise, Demetri was on time – or rather, early, waiting for her at the crossroads with a paperback book in his hands. He tucked it into his pocket and smiled as he saw Atiena approach.

"Good book?" she asked, wondering how close she could come to engaging in small talk and still feel like herself.

"A friend recommended it," Demetri replied. "I'm liking it so far, but I'm not sure how they'll finagle a happy ending out of it."

"Are you sure it'll have a happy ending?"

"It would be… uncharacteristic if it did not."

They headed down the familiar track to the encampment, where the soldiers milled about in what amounted to leisure time for their kind – camo and tank tops and jeans, cleaning guns and repairing engines, playing drinking games around a stone circle that contained fire once the night drew down. The girls technically had a curfew that meant they were only here briefly during the day to speak to Uzokuwa or Uzohola or Wick, but from the room that Atiena shared with Liara, she could sometimes glimpse the glow of fires across the rooftops, and sometimes, when they had something to celebrate, could hear the music. But this morning there seemed to be few revels in motion, everyone still moving about rather languidly as though only half-awake.

"Now," Demetri said, as they skirted some of the tents that had been set up outside the prefabs that served as temporary communication hubs. "I wasn't sure what you were expecting when you said shooting range, so…. well, it's nothing fancy."

Atiena smiled. "You'd have to work hard to disappoint me, your Majesty."

"Well, let's just wait until you see what's waiting for you." They rounded the corner and Atiena could not hold back a laugh as she saw the beer bottles lined up on the low stone wall, about five hundred metres away. And there were a _lot _of bottles. "I am assured," Demetri said wryly. "That the rebels were delighted to hear that you needed targets."

"I don't suppose there's any left for us?"

"You intend to shoot under the influence, Lady Atiena?"

She shrugged. "Bit of Dutch courage to steady my hand. Wouldn't hurt."

Demetri smiled. "Let me see what I can do." He reached down and picked up the rifle that had been left out for Atiena – a Berkut 3, if she had to guess, a powerful semi-automatic more suited to hunting game than to sniping people. She wondered if maybe that was intended to lower the threat she might pose to the king, or if maybe the rebels here were so attached to their firearms as an adjunct of themselves that Demetri had faced some trouble trying to find someone willing to loan them a gun.

"Russian?" she said.

"Russian," he confirmed, and handed her a box of magazines. "SP for big game, anything over five hundred pounds, FMJ for anything below."

Atiena cast an assessing eye over the beer bottles. "I'm going to guess," she said. "That these are… below." There was a note of dry humour in her voice that she made no effort to hide.

"One way to find out." Demetri shot in a bladed stance with his right side facing the target, Atiena noted, less tactical and more competitive, though she thought that was likely because he wanted to hit the bottles precisely rather than just smash a few rounds through a threat. He pulled the trigger and just like that – the noise was like a second gunshot – the bottle exploded with such overwhelming force that the ricocheting pieces smashed two of the bottles next to it. The ejected cartridge spun through the air, spent, and landed at Atiena's feet.

Atiena could not resist the gleeful note in her voice as she said, "nice shot, sir. Agares warned me to expect much worse."

Demetri said, "I think we're standing too close. I never hit them first time."

She thought that he was probably just being humble.

They stepped back another few hundred metres, and this time, Atiena adopted the athletic stance that Killmonger preferred, mourning the loss of her aperture sights as she did so. Semi-automatic meant she could pull off a few shots without stopping to reload – twenty or thirty, depending on the rifle, though the Berkut felt steady enough she thought it trended higher. "Your Majesty," she said. "You don't mind if I outshine you, do you?"

"It would be very rude to do so on a date," Demetri said, rather sarcastically, and Atiena took that to be permission, because she began to fire, fast and focused. _One, two, three, four…_. She could almost imagine Killmonger standing over here, instructing her, "aim on the inhale, fire on the exhale, aim, fire, inhale, exhale, _well done, Atiena!_", as she swept her muzzle left to right, very methodically, glass shattering and raining out in all directions,_ five, six, seven, eight_. This was why they usually used cans in Tammins, she thought ruefully, but it was very much in the character of these rebels to prefer the flashier, deadlier variants, _nine, ten, eleven, twelve_.

She lowered her gun, and smiled to see that she had demolished the line. Demetri let out a low, appreciative whistle, and Atiena heard someone call from behind her, "all that drinking for nothing? Morale will be at an all time low."

She turned to see the familiar silhouette of Wickanninish Harjo approaching them, carrying a crate, the gorgeous Uzohola trailing behind him with a rifle lying on either shoulder.

"You might just have to drink more," Demetri said.

Wick grinned at Atiena. "You're a good shot, Morris. I mean, I'd heard you were good..."

"But that was magical," Uzohola added, and Atiena had to look at her shoes to try and hide the blush that flared in her cheeks.

"We come, bearing more targets." Wick set down the crate and looked into it. Uzohola reached over to take Atiena's rifle, and hand her a handgun instead. "Like this." He pulled out what seemed to be a memorial plate, bearing the face of the bastard prince, Mordred. "Ready?" He cocked back his arm, and flung it like a frisbee; Atiena tracked it low over the ground and then snapped up her arms and fired off a single shot. The ceramic plate shattered into a thousand pieces, and Uzohola and Wick whooped appreciatively.

"This one's for you, Demetri, darling." Uzohola flung another plate, and Demetri mimicked Atiena, tracking low and then firing in a single fluid motion. Atiena was starting to suspect that Agares had exaggerated his poor aim, for the plate similarly exploded. He passed his gun to Uzohola, and threw a beer bottle for Atiena, who hit it with negligible focus, and then Wick threw something – Atiena thought it might have been a book of propaganda – for Uzohola, and the group groaned in collective disappointment as her shot only winged the book and spent it spinning, shedding pages, rather than shredding it as it should have.

"More practise needed," Uzohola conceded good-naturedly, and stooped to hurl something into the air. "Atiena, make me proud..."

This time, Atiena shot one-handed, and the group cheered as she managed to fire not one but two perfect holes into the beer can that Uzohola had thrown, one on the way up and one on the way down.

"I can do one better," Demetri said firmly, and Atiena said, "you're going to have to prove it, Demetri," and he did not protest the use of his first name, only indicated that Atiena should speak less and throw more and she was all too glad to comply, immediately and gleefully.

It was almost like Atiena was back home in Tammins, shooting with the rest of the Morrises, except there was always some sense of hierarchy at home, that she had to provide a good example for the younger kids, had to make Killmonger proud. With Demetri and his friends, though, she could just shoot and shout and throw things and watch things shatter into a million glowing fragments in the afternoon sun.

* * *

Sometimes they left the window lit, so that Cor and Khione could see one another in their respective cells. Khione was usually shackled; her wounds were beginning to heal now, very gradually, and Thiago had let her out long enough to wash the blood from her hair and change into spare clothes loaned from a rebel, but even so, with every glance at the black eye that the king's brute forces had given her little sister, Cor felt the knot of rage twist a little tighter in her gut. They would regret this. They didn't know it yet, but they would regret this, more than they regretted anything else they had ever done.

Launching a rebellion would seem a picnic compared to what she would do to them.

They could not communicate well – Cor had tried tapping out Morse code on the window, but Khione could not reach the mirror on her side to do the same, so short the chain they had accorded her. Instead, she had managed to mouth some information to her sister in the few minutes they were accorded together, highly conscious of the fact that they were undoubtedly being observed by some concealed camera. Cor had been able to get the gist.

_Decimated_, was the word Khione had used.

Cor wasn't sure how that could be so, but she had a sinking feeling of realisation in the pit of her stomach that inculcating such extreme loyalty in the Pandora foot soldiers may have come back to bite. Would they risk action if they knew that there was a risk that they would kill her? Not only her, but the others – Khione, Knox Harlen and Kan Justus, at the very minimum, had been caught in some way. Cor wondered how many fatalities the Kingdom in Exile had sustained, trying to take just Knox down. She wondered how Demetri planned to defend that to his people.

What really worried Cor, more than about the fates she knew, was those she did not. And what really worried her was that Khione hadn't seen what had happened to Vida Cox, Cor's loyal third in command, madame of the brothels who paid tithe to Pandora. No one had heard from her, no one knew what had happened, and the idea that sweet, kind, maternal Vida might not even be in an underground cell, might be under the ground in a much more permanent way, might be lying in the soil in some bastardly unmarked grave….

Cor shut her eyes, and took a deep breath before the anger could swell again. _N__o. _She had faith in her family. This was… a challenge. But the Rouens were not strangers to challenges.

Any minute now, she thought narrowly, her lieutenant Zenith would be kicking open the door to her cell and asking her who in the Inner Circle she wanted to flay first.

And Cor would reply, "let's get creative with it."

So she could afford to wait. The tides might move slowly, she thought narrowly, but they were inevitable. And she kept that thought to the forefront of her mind as there was a rap on the door and she sat up on the thin cot they had given her to see Thiago step into the room.

Food, she thought darkly, because she was no good to them starved to death. It had crossed her mind to refuse food, just to see what they would do, how far they would go, how much they cared about keeping her alive, but she knew that she needed to be strong for whatever came next.

She didn't have to be friendly, though, and in fact the thought could not have been farther from her mind. She was no longer in the Selection; she no longer had to put on a facade of civility. _Yue_, she thought, _Saran_, the poor dears, still caught in Demetri's web. Whenever she got out of her, she would have to go back for them. And that was that, a concrete decision, and one more thing to add to the list whenever it all came together. Get out, skin the king alive, get Yue and Saran out.

She almost laughed at how easy she made it sound in her head.

"Something funny?" Thiago said mildly.

"Something funny," Cor confirmed, moving to wrap her arms around her knees and watch him intently as he set the food down on the small desk in the corner. He had given her paper as well, but she wasn't sure who he expected her to write to. Maybe they were expecting her to compose her confession. She thought of what they had said to her, when they had first trapped her down here, so far from the sun: _liars and killers, in the service of liars and killers_. No doubt when this was all over, they would march her out onto the Report and cut off her head as Mordred had done to the General, and they would call that justice.

Well, she thought, they wouldn't get the chance. But that was probably the _plan_.

"You know what I think is funny?" He was chatty today. Sometimes the spymaster just dropped in her meals, and sometimes he talked. Today was clearly a talking day. Thiago said, "_you_ came to _us_."

Cor set her jaw, and thought about getting creative with what was going to com enext.

"So I don't understand you being angry. Did you expect us to just… let you participate in the Selection? We would have been fools to let you slip away."

Cor said, very darkly, "your foolishness is not in question."

"Well," Thiago said. "I won't argue. But I'm not the one trapped like a rat." He paused. "Actually, rats are harder to catch."

Cor said, her tongue dripping venom, "hilarious."

Thiago shrugged and threw her an apple – she caught it in one hand without looking – and said, "just remember. For every day that you are down here, the lives of a thousand ordinary people improve. I know you think us evil but…." He shrugged. "I'll take those odds."

Cor said, "I was born an Eight in a system that was designed to choke me before I ever saw the sun. For every day that I am down here, a thousand Eights just like me go a little bit hungrier, go to sleep a little bit colder, hurt a little bit longer. Would you take _those _odds?"

"You create a supply of pain and then you feign surprise that there's demand." Thiago's voice was low. "What do you think I was born, Corvina?"

Cor met his dark eyes without hesitation. "Are you asking me for solidarity?"

"I'm saying I managed to see the sun without ever running a brothel, or stealing from widows, or breaking a poor man's knees because the cards came up badly."

"No," Cor said, "you just murder people and recruit orphans into a hopeless crusade in the name of divine right. I see why you claim the high ground."

Thiago just said, quite softly, "let me know when you're ready to see the sun again," and shut the door behind him as he left.

Cor was tempted to smash the food he had given her against the wall, but the thought of any fit of temper being captured on the concealed cameras hidden throughout the war galled her like an open wound. Instead, she lay back against the cot, and thought again of her last exchange with Demetri:

"_You're no better than Ysabel."_

_"It's starting to look that way."_

Well, she thought, she had always planned to take Ysabel's head. She was sure she could find the energy to take two.

Three, if you counted Thiago's.

* * *

Pa Klahan would not have admitted it to anyone that asked, but she rather liked having the Axiom girl to stay with her. Eden could tell that she did, though the two usually found themselves in companionable silence rather than idle chatter. Pa reminded Eden greatly of what she had expected the General to be – somehow sardonic without saying anything, exceedingly practical and pragmatic, somehow plain in all she did as though she could not envisage a world in which one could do otherwise. She wondered which of those features she had imparted into the little Demetri with which she had been entrusted, all those years ago, whether beneath his charming facade he was as straight-forward as his foster mother, whether he muttered under his breath when something irritated him, whether he put his hands on his hips when he was making a sharp proclamation like Pa's frequent utterances of _k__hn ngò_ when she thought Eden had fucked something up or _k__racxk_ when she was feeling fond of her. Eden had grown to learn these meant _idiot _and _little sparrow_ respectively, and had grown in turn to wear them both with some degree of fondness and pride, to the degree that where she was not credited on propaganda under her true name, she was listed as Klahan Ngó. That was become more and more seldom, however, as she gradually proved her worth to Enyakatho, little by little.

Her interview with Pa Klahan had been a huge hit, not just in the Wastes but among immigrant populations in Illea where her open nostalgia for what had once been had struck a powerful chord among those who mourned the days of King Trajan. Eden was sure her mother must have seen it, and sometimes, when she could not stop herself, she wondered what her mother had thought of it. Had she thought it too syrupy, too heavy handed, lacking in artistic merit? Had she thought of her daughter when she watched it? Or maybe she had refused to allow it on the screen. Eden had no doubt the Axiom would have denounced the film. Maybe her old friend, Brooks, had been the one to write the article that called her a traitor for the thousandth time. Or maybe they were busily pretending she did not exist.

When these thoughts occurred to her, Eden did her best not to think about it. Such thoughts were useless unless she could use them as fuel.

And so, when these thoughts occurred to her today, she took her camera and she headed out to the village to work on the photo project she was working on. On her last visit, she had talked a few old women into letting her create their portraits, and taken pictures of stray dogs in the street fighting over scraps, and captured an argument between merchants, both bearing the sharp Ⴟ brand that marked them as thieves from the Russian Federation. She had not begun this little project with any true aim, but now that she was beginning to make herself useful on the propaganda side – Enyakatho, the director of the Report, had arrived at Pa's farm last night to discuss the newspaper they were setting up for the Kingdom, and what tone they wanted to strike – she thought that it might make a nice retrospective, if this all ended someday. A look at the ordinary life of the citizen in the Kingdom of Exile, far away from the familiar images of war and destruction that rebel and Crown alike loved to fill the airwaves with from dusk until dawn. Simple images of an ordinary life, ticking under it all, the heart that kept the rest of the body moving.

Usually, when she wanted to go to the village, Eden had to have soldiers guarding her, and that meant she rarely got to go to the village, because the soldiers hated her, even now, even after she had spent weeks dedicating herself to the rebellion. She could not quite blame them. After all, they had spent years and decades doing the same. But today, Pa needed to go to market ("that fishmonger doesn't know what's coming," she had muttered darkly, for she was engaged in a feud with the unfortunate man holding the stall next to her), so she had hitched up the trailer to the truck and Eden had clambered into the back of the cab, where live chickens were rustling and squawking incessantly. It was a short trip into the village, made shorter by the fact that Eden was lulled easily into a doze by the gentle rocking of the vehicle, and when they arrived Pa waved away any attempt on Eden's part to help her set up ("haven't you your own work, girl?").

So Eden wandered. Market day was the busiest time of the week for the little village, and even then, the crowds were small; many in this part of the Wasteland had little English, so she communicated with her hands and her camera what she was asking of them as she moved between them. She thought of the number of times she had ignored similar requests from black-suited photographers at black-tie events she had been expected to attend in Angeles, and felt a sudden pang in her heart that she could not label as homesickness or regret, but something different and entirely more bitter.

The Anchorites always came into town for market day, and Eden rather delighted in taking photos of them – they were such a secretive group, practically unknown within Illea and yet accepted in the Kingdom in Exile as a kind of conscientious objector, neither rebel nor Crown but a pacifist middle ground that refused to recognise either as sovereign. After all, as Eden had heard several times by now, they had been here long before there was an Illea to fight over. She didn't think that was _quite _true, but she didn't see the point of disabusing them of their historical notions.

The Anchorite women always had two names, and you had to say them together whenever you said them, so the woman who ran the jewellery stall was Beyaz Inci, both names together, never just Beyaz and never just Inci, and the woman over at the stall that sold forged documents was always Kuru Chernila, both names together, never just Kuru and never just Chernila. They wore rather drab colours, accented with a single bright point of colour in the cloth that they wore over their mouths while they travelled. The men, on the other hand, always had one name, short, like Kün or Täj or Rëz, and they dressed much like the other civilian men, but for the white lily they pinned to their collar when they came to town, to mark them as standing between the two worlds which existed in the Kingdom. Man and woman alike often smoked a pipe packed with _metzliaxitia, _the acrid scent of which hung low over the market as children darted and called and played between stalls. Eden had always heard they were a reclusive people, but that just meant that they had never heard of the Axiom and had little reason to hate her as others did – or at least, they pretended not to. Most of the younger members of the community had good English in that guttural accent of the Wastes, and agreed cheerfully to requests for photos, posing as any teenagers in Angeles might have: arms wrapped around each other, pulling faces, sticking out one leg dramatically in an exaggeratedly sultry position. And that, Eden thought wryly, was just the boys. They would crowd around her afterwards to watch as she flicked through the results on the camera's little monitor, and invariably pronounce them _ados_, which Pa had translated as "acceptable" but which they pronounced with great relish and excitement.

That had been another thing Eden was pushing for, to include in their new newspaper some piece of the Anchorite language to try and draw them into the fold, to make them more amenable to being a minority within the Kingdom in Exile rather than a minority without. After all, she thought, one of the king's Inner Circle belonged to their community, and many of their men had been drafted forcibly into one of the two sides – it was not a question of if, but when, and how painfully they would be assimilated when it came to it. Eden thought it was preferable that assimilation took the form of open arms rather than a cracking whip. So she had begun to gingerly pick up what she could from the market, and this time when she showed the children the photos she had taken of them – a little Anchorite girl and her even littler brother, carrying bags of seed larger than they were – she pre-empted their responses by declaring the results "_ados_!" and was quietly rather delighted when they nodded vigorously and confirmed that they were, indeed, _ados_.

Acceptable. Eden thought the word had to be a little stronger than that, once you put it into context.

She promised the children's mother copies of the photo on the next market day, and carefully marked down a few details of their life to include whenever she managed to find place for her collection. And then she moved on, to the next person, to the next photo.

One of her photos that day came from an interview with a young, grieving widow – if you could really call it _favourite_, Eden supposed. The woman's husband had been killed in action two weeks and buried in secret. That detail – burial – surprised Eden, because everyone knew that rebels burned their dead. But the young woman's portrait came out wonderfully, at once steely and vulnerable, her eyes all a-sheen with unshed tears and yet her jaw absolutely set, and looking at it, Eden knew that she had found the image for the front page of their propaganda paper. If traditional Selections looked for Daughters of Illea, then this, she thought, was the ideal Daughter in Exile, the quintessential Daughter of the Rebellion. No great beauty, and she exuded independence and grief and strength in equal measure.

This, Eden thought, is what she would have to be if she wanted to win this Selection.

"King Demetri says he'll look after us," the young woman said, as Eden scrawled her caption, "there's me and there's the four kids and I know he'll pay well given the love that he bore our Herry but… what good is money? What good is food? I asked him to give me the bitch queen's head and he promised me he would not fail me."

Eden said, "I have faith that he will not. Our king does not make hollow promises."

The widow reached to clasp Eden's hands, her hands tough and calloused compared to Eden's. "Lady Lahela," she said, quite seriously. "You will make a wonderful queen for our kingdom."

Eden said, quite impulsively, and yet feeling that she was saying precisely the right thing, "let there be no Queen in Exile until you have Ysabel's head in your hands."

The vicious smile that earned her from the young widow confirmed she had spoken true.

When she returned to the truck, Pa was just finished packing everything back into the trailer, and gestured that Eden should join her in the front of the cab, now that she had sold off the lamb that had occupied the passenger's seat on their trip there. In its place was a new kitten the colour of treacle, no bigger than Eden's fist, that Pa said was to be their new mouser. "You'll have to take it," she said, "Demetri always looked after the cats when he lived with us, and they don't seem to like me very much."

"You got me a cat?"

_"Demetri_ got the _farm_ a cat." Pa rolled her eyes. "_K__hn ngò_! Idiot!"

Eden settled into the seat with the kitten placed carefully on her lap, batting at the camera strap with curiosity. She had been bitten by a dog as a child, and was still skittish around them as a result, but she had always been rather fond of cats; she had looked after Fatimah's cat after she had defected to the Kingdom, right up until she returned from the Kingdom with missing limbs and a haunted look behind her eyes. And it was, Eden thought, a gift from the king. Apparently. She wondered if he had realised she might be lonely, on her own at Pa's, surrounded by men and women who wanted her dead. _Colaboracionistas serán ahorcad_, she thought grimly, _collaborationists will be hanged_. Well, even if the cat was unlikely to protect her, it was at least some small sign of Demetri's favour, and that might provide some defence.

Pa said, "oh, did you hear? You've made the Elite. Enyakatho will probably want to interview you this evening. I'm going to make stroganoff."

Eden kept a tight control of her facial expressions. Pa made it so _casual_. "I didn't hear," she said. "That's good news."

"Excellent news, _kracxk." _Pa was still wearing her hair in the twin Dutch braids Eden had taught her during her first week on the farm. They swung, all salt and pepper, as the older woman turned to look at the Selected girl. "I'll be taking credit, of course. First I made a king, now I've made a queen."

Eden bit down on a smile. "Don't I get any kudos, Pa?"

Pa shrugged. "Does an artist give kudos to the clay he works with?" She looked at Eden, and looked like she was considering saying something, but had decided against it. The kitten moved, warm and soft, in Eden's lap.

"What are you thinking, Pa?"

"Oh," the older woman said. "Just that you're rather Demetri's type. It's no surprise he likes you."

"Is this something he's told you?" Eden asked. "Or something you've divined?"

Pa just reached for the radio, and Eden had to laugh at the older woman's habits as she settled herself back against the seat and watched the wastes blur past outside the window. Later that evening, after dinner and after the nameless kitten had been introduced to its new little nest in the barn, Eden went up to the little room Pa had given her and wondered, not for the first time, if maybe this had been the room that Demetri had lived in as a younger boy, when he had first been abducted. She had intended to prepare the photos from earlier that day, put them into order and write up a full account of their subject's story, but the little kitten had followed her up into the room and kept trying to dip its paws into the stop bath and the developer so that Eden had to keep stopping her work to pick it up and put it back on her bed.

Maybe she wasn't cut out to be a wife and mother to the rebellion, she thought wryly, and was distracted from this thought again as the kitten became very interested in something under the bed and mewling loudly. She had to reach under the frame to try and reach it, worried it might have caught itself on a nail or something sticking out of the wall, but as her hands passed over the floorboards, she abruptly realised that one of them was very loose.

Very loose indeed. So loose, that she could pry it up, just enough to slip her hands inside and pull out the little wooden box within, kitten and photography and interview forgotten. She pulled it loose, and looked at it - just an ordinary teak box, the kind the Anchorites used to collect money at their market stalls. It was probably nothing, she thought, probably some forgotten savings box belonging to one of the room's previous residents, some trivial collection of knick-knacks assembled by one of the Klahans' children, maybe some love letters or correspondence saved away by a member of the family.

But that list, Eden thought, was very short, for Pa and the General had very little reason to hide anything in the floorboards in their own home, and in _this _room specifically, and Vardi Tayna had not spent very much time on the farm.

So that really only left one possibility.

Eden hesitated for only a moment before she set the box onto her bedside locker, unopened. She would finish preparing the photos, she decided, and maybe open it later.

Yes, maybe see what lay within later.

* * *

Liz could not say she liked the orphanage anymore than she had liked the bunker. With Opal and Nina so abruptly gone and Sol stubbornly still waiting on her meeting with Demetri, Liz had been moved up to Layeni as well, the distance between the girls dwindling as their numbers did. She hadn't known Saran Altai very well when they were in the old safehouse, but she seemed glad to have some company and came out to greet Liz with a hug on the steps of the building when she arrived.

"Wasn't sure if I'd see you again," Liz said, and Saran could only nod and agree.

"It seemed touch and go there for a while."

They walked inside. The orphanage reminded Liz oddly of a converted church, all high vaulted open spaces and windows with coloured glass set into their panes. Saran introduced a few of the kids as they passed, all of them seeming quite fond of the short Northern girl, and Liz noted with amusement that there was more than one Demetri and Wick among them. It seemed the heroes of the Kingdom in Exile were being honoured, even if it was only with the names of orphans here and there.

Their room was small, what Liz's little niece Paisley would have called cozy, all homemade patch quilts and thick cotton curtains. One side of the room clearly belonged to Saran: framed photos of her friends and family decorated the bedside locker, and a tapestry with an intricate Mongolian design, bearing the marks of neat folding, covered the wall without a window. The other side of the room was utterly stripped bare, with just a duvet sitting folded at the end of the bed. Liz didn't have many things with her – what clothes she retained after so long on the run with the Selection, a scrapbook containing photos of her family and the last art pieces her nephew and niece had gifted her, the letter that had confirmed her fiancé's death. Had that really only been a year ago? She found it impossible to believe so little time had passed. She still thought of herself as half-a-widow.

She sat down on the bed and looked at Saran. "Well? How is it here?"

"How was it where you were?"

"Boring. Monotonous." Liz shook her head. "Just… watching the Report and taking long walks. We saw Demetri once. At a funeral."

"It's not much better here," Saran conceded, and Liz sighed, because she hadn't really expected any different. "We see Demetri a little bit more, but… no individual time. The children keep me busy, but you don't need to spend time with them if you don't want to, I think Lissa and I just love kids…."

Liz thought of Hunter and Paisley and all the children she would never have with Wyatt. "I want to."

Saran smiled, and Liz thought it was easy to see why she had been drafted into the Selection with a smile like that. "Would you like to join Yue and I? We're going to pick berries with some of the Wicks and some of the Demetris at about noon."

Liz laughed. "How do you tell them all apart?"

"Hair colour," Saran said immediately, and laughed. "And after that, numbers. We might have to start watching the Report here, I don't think we've kept up..."

"Eden Lahela has had quite a few pieces aired," Liz said. "She's a precocious propagandist, it seems… She's not kicking about here, is she?"

"I haven't seen her," Saran confirmed, and Liz wondered yet again if that was a sign in their favour or in Eden's.

"And..." Liz raised an eyebrow. "Can I ask? What happened to Lissa?" It seemed so long ago that they had shared that initial brief odd bond together in the Wasteland safehouse, the _eltowns_, the rarely parted. Lissa was bubbly, and impulsive, and sometimes very, _very _odd, but she had been genuine in a way that Liz had not seen in the Selection until she had got to know Nina and Opal through hours and hours of laughing at the Report and gossiping about the various rebels and talking long walks around the compound together talking about noting in particular.

An unreadable expression flitted across Saran's face, and was gone again before Liz could even really register what it might mean. "Transfer," she said. "They're moving some of us around… counter-espionage, I think, is what Wick calls it."

Liz rolled her eyes. "This would be… brunette Wick?"

"Wick number one," Saran agreed and Liz groaned and threw herself back on the bed.

"_Counter espionage_," she repeated. "Dear god, sometimes I _really _miss the farm."

* * *

"Thiago." Administer Givre narrowed his eyes as he stepped into the spymaster's office and caught sight of the girl they all knew as Lady Marjorie cloistered in the corner with notebooks all around her. "I was given to understand this was to be a confidential meeting."

"This is my assistant." Thiago indicated Marjorie with a flick of his hand and she, unsure of the correct etiquette, just waved. "If she hears anything she shouldn't have, we can just kill her afterwards."

Marjorie still wasn't entirely able to tell when he was joking, and Givre still looked rather ill at ease as he moved to accept a seat at the desk. This was Marjorie's first time glimpsing the man known as Lord Bernard, defector from the court, up close. Officially Administer for Finance, she had been ensconced within the rebellion long enough to recognise that he was part of what they called high command – the actual decision makers behind the rebellion. Demetri wasn't just a figure head, Thiago had made that clear, he would not have settled for mere symbolic status, but in certain matters, apparently he was overruled.

"Certain matters" including, it seemed, the entirety of the Selection so far.

"Very well." Lord Bernard had thin skin stretched even thinner over brittle bones and leathery skin tanned by sun and age alike, a stubborn set to his features and deep-set acutely intelligent eyes beneath thick grey eyebrows. "What have you got for us?"

"Jori? The photos, _por favor_."

"_Aquí tienes_." Marjorie grabbed the little folio he had indicated and handed it over to him, her mind reeling. Over the past few days, Thiago had allowed her to help him write reports for high command, encrypt messages to the king, co-ordinate spies, but it had all been very harmless, useless information, so toothless that she had suspected he had just been trying to keep her busy enough that she did not venture into the tunnels or ask what happened to Cor, why she had left so abruptly. She had copied out weather reports, simple troop movements, the kind of stuff that she could have probably guessed at without access to any espionage or information whatsoever.

So why, why, why was she being allowed into a meeting of this degree of importance?

The thought rose in her mind that he might just be showing her favouritism because they were both Mexican, which almost made her laugh then and there.

Thiago shook the photos out into his hand – Polaroids, Marjorie saw, and again, did not know why the idea struck her as so funny. "Very well. The false king's Selection will be coming underway. We have gained some information that suggests our own Selection may be compromised by the same."

Givre's voice was laconic. "Are they going to steal our ratings?"

"They're going to steal our _contestants_." Marjorie's head jerked up as Thiago continued. "At 1600 two nights ago, our convoy was attacked en route to an established safe place in Sonage and heavy casualties sustained."

Givre groaned. "Don't tell me."

Thiago continued, unapologetic. "Obelisk has confirmed that Opal McIntyre has been taken." _Obelisk_, Marjorie knew by now, was the codename for the spy they had in the palace, some poor maid or guard pressed into risking their lives to pass information back to the Wastes. Apparently, Obelisk was sometimes a little difficult to deal with, all the moreso now that Vardi Tayna, their usual handler, was busy with other matters. "Taken," Thiago continued. "To the palace in Angeles."

A matching pair, Marjorie thought, leverage on leverage, and felt her stomach sink. She had not known Opal very well, but she doubted that anything good was waiting for her in the palace. Not after she had lived here, in the Kingdom in Exile, for so long.

"We suspect she will be forced into his Selection for propaganda purposes, but we're not sure how long she'll prove useful in that regard. Their story will be that Opal McIntyre saw the error of her ways and defected… they'll sell her as a reformed martyr, is my guess. In any case, she won't win the Selection, but they'll milk her for all the propaganda they can and keep her in check with that hostage of theirs."

"If so," Givre said. "Anything that happens to her after that is on Mordred's head. She defects to the Crown, and suffers an unhappy accident… it's the _defection _that looks bad."

Thiago raised an eyebrow. "Obelisk can ensure she does not get the chance to defect."

Marjorie thought her pen was going to break in her hand.

"I'll pass it up the chain. Is that all?"

"Not quite." Thiago set another photo on the table. "Naran Altai. Twin sister of Saran. Unlikely to be Selected, but her grandfather has submitted her application."

Givre shook his head. "Mr Altai may need a visit from the Warden," he said solemnly, "to remind him of the terms of his residence in the Kingdom in Exile. But… gently, Thiago. We cannot lose access to the Altai mines in Yukon."

"Gentle as a feather, Bernard." Thiago looked at Marjorie expectantly, and, with a start, she began to scrawl notes on the closest scrap of paper in her own familiar shorthand. Most of the papers she had been sorting through had been done in some sort of chickenscratch – she wasn't sure if they were encoded, or just in godawful handwriting. "Finally. We intercepted one of the messages moving north from the Selection."

"From the mole?" Givre leaned forward, the chair creaking in a facsimile of his voice.

"You'll know when I do. All I can say is… there was an interception."

"Very well. No news on that Dove girl? The Eight?"

Marjorie could not tell for sure, but she thought it very likely – in fact she was almost sure – that Thiago was lying when he replied, "if there was news, I'd tell you the news."

"Very well." Their briefing complete, Givre stood and turned to offer Marjorie the slightest of bows, almost as though his skeleton wouldn't survive a deeper gesture. "Lady Marjorie. A delight to meet you, after reading about you for all these weeks."

She inclined her head. "Lord Bernard." She waited until he had left the room, knowing that Thiago's office was such a hotbed of activity that it was doubtful the door would stay shut for long, and then leaned forward and hissed, "_que está pasando_?"

_What is going on?_

"_U__n libro debería ser emocionante, no?"_ Thiago barely gave her a sideways glance as he swiped the photos back into their folder and the door burst open to admit another of his little birds from somewhere out in the rebellion, eager to tell him about news overheard in a bar regarding munition shipments from Swendway, due to arrive next week, and they returned to the oddly mundane business of espionage, Marjorie turning Thiago's words over in her mind even as she took notes, carefully marking down times and co-ordinates and numbers of guards.

_A book should be exciting, right?_

* * *

Atiena stayed with the rebels, not for the one or two hours that Demetri had forecast, but for the rest of the day, shooting until it was time for lunch and then accompanying Demetri to the garage to help repair an engine that was giving Uzokuwa some trouble. He was surprised to find what easy company she was, but a part of him thought that this was because she did not expect anything of him and he did not expect anything of her. They were not going to fall in love – she was already in love with the war, just as Raphael had once been. Demetri could relate to that and, he was surprised to find, he could relate to Atiena.

It was almost like having Raphael back in the fray.

They ate dinner together as well, and Atiena got her requested bottle of beer, and then another half dozen or so as the sky scorched a deeper and deeper navy as the hours slipped by, and then Wick produced some vodka and before Demetri could protest he had things to do in the morning, they were doing shots and Atiena was holding her own against Uzokuwa and Demetri was thinking, if they picked queens based on their ability to hold their liquor, he would have had to marry Atiena ten times over.

And really, he found himself thinking, once he was several drinks in, if he was being totally honest, if he was being honest with himself with himself as he so rarely was, they were looking for a queen for the rebellion, not a wife for Demetri, and with that in mind, Atiena was rapidly distinguishing herself as an excellent candidate. Most of the girls fell on one side of the line or other – he could think of one or two who straddled the threshold – but Atiena seemed like someone you could live a decent life with, even if you didn't love her.

Ah, but Uzohola was right. He was a romantic. And _decent_ wasn't quite _good_.

They walked back to Raphael's together, having hit the sweet spot where Atiena was a little bit giggly but still able to walk in a straight line. "I had a good time," she said, as they reached the house, "this not-a-date of ours... I had a really good time."

"Me too," Demetri said, and was surprised to find that he fully meant it. "I'll see you soon, Atiena."

"I'll see you, Demetri." She was sober enough to wink at him, and tipsy enough to find that wink much funnier than it actually was, which in and of itself was amusing. "Get home safe!"

Home, Demetri thought ruefully, watching her stumble into Rafa's house. Wasn't that a thought.

Even vaguely tipsy as he was, he could not shake the impression, as he watched Atiena shut the door behind herself, that he was being watched from the windows above. And indeed, as he stepped back flickered his gaze upwards, he caught sight of a wraith moving in Täj's window. In the gloom of the night, Vardi Tayna's eyes looked like pools of gasoline, Demetri thought, gasoline in search of a match.

* * *

Liara said, "Demetri took Atiena on a date today."

They had walked a long way without talking, Täj keeping his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched as though leaning into the wind, Liara unsure of precisely how to attack this conversation. This was not an ordinary Selection, she thought, and ordinary considerations did not apply. And this was not, precisely, a conversation about the Selection, was it?

"Did he?" There was something about the curl of his mouth that reminded her of Ysabel, the way that she could smile with only her eyes, the way she could remain so cold and still-featured and yet let some wry fondness shine through. Täj didn't look like the kind of man that was ever fond of anything, except maybe of smoking, and as though prompted by her mere thought, he produced a cigarette from his pocket and a lighter from his sleeve and all the pale planes of his face were lit by the flicker of the little flame.

She thought, not for the first time, that he did not smell like a smoker, but like a sagebrush wildfire. Like he belonged to the wastes.

"Yes," Liara said, "he did."

Täj's tone was so studiously uninterested that she knew in her gut that it was an act. "Did he have a good time?"

"I didn't hear."

"Well," Täj said, his tone soft. "I hope he did."

She thought, not for the first time, that she might never have a hope of understanding the bond between them, Demetri and Täj, king and executioner, golden royal and pale rebel. Like shadows of each other, Liara thought, almost like Demetri and Mordred had been. And the anger flared up under her ribs, sudden and overwhelming, that Demetri had _replaced _his brother with this killer, like Mordred had never existed, never loved him, never mourned him.

The anger faded almost as quickly as it had flared as Täj looked at her. Those bled-out eyes of his seemed to understand her without speaking. "Are you jealous?"

Liara stopped and folded her arms, forcing Täj to stop as well, and look back at her. There was a night market on in the square below them, golden lights seeming to hang in the gloom like so many fireflies. The light framed Täj's silhouette and seemed to erode at his sharp edges, making him look very abruptly tired. "That seems an inappropriate question."

"This seems an inappropriate situation." He put his cigarette between his lips, and the tip glowed bright. Liara purposefully let the silence hang between them for a very long, tense moment. "You wanted tea, right?"

"Well," Liara said. "I wanted answers."

"You're in the wrong place for that."

"That's becoming clear."

That produced a smile from him, the first of the night, all sharp cuspids and crows feet. Then he just turned on his heel and kept walking, and Liara had to narrow her eyes and swear under her breath and go to catch up with him as he reached the crossroads and took, not the fork that headed out to the soldier's encampment where Uzohola would be sleeping, or the fork that snaked down into the square were Wick would be drinking, but the third option, the one that led a little out of town until path was replaced by wasteland underfoot, and they walked a little further, just far enough that the light pollution of the village behind them was lost to the night and the sky above them stretched, velvety black and studded deeply with stars, brighter than Liara had ever seen them in Angeles. They came down to the river that snaked through Layeni, the one that had frozen over closer to the centre of town. At this part, though, the surface was flowing but calm, and there was a small set of steps leading down to a salmon-fishing plinth that Täj and Liara could sit down on.

Täj said, "if you want answers, you should talk to Demetri."

"Demetri won't talk to me."

"That is his right. What sort of a friend would I be if I betrayed his trust?"

The river was illuminated by threads of moonlight, overcast by the canopy of heaven which seemed somewhat dark and oppressive tonight, as though the stars were wearing the twinkle of chloroform. Liara wasn't sure if it was the night, or the fact that she could hear Täj's breathing, so quiet was the silence that had fallen between them, but she just said, "I was his friend once."

Täj's voice was purposefully soft, but they were so close that she could almost feel it reverberate in her ribs. Liara always forgot how deep it was, so little did he speak in Raphael's house. "I know."

There were fish flashing in the river, darting up just briefly enough for their scales to glimmer under the stars and then disappear again. Liara said, "would it be easier for him if I left?"

"Of course it would be."

She could not deny that this stung. She had not expected him to answer so quickly.

But Täj continued. "But why would you care about making things easier for him?"

"Because I… care about him."

"He doesn't seem to care about you."

There was a set to Täj's mouth as he said it, a solemnity that hadn't been there before. Liara wasn't sure why she trusted him. She only knew that she did – or at least, trusted him with these petty things, the ordinary fears of an ordinary girl in an ordinary Selection._ Does he like me? Does he think I'm pretty? Do I have a chance?_ She measured each word as she said it.

"Seems," she repeated.

He turned his cigarette in his hand, and flicked ash into the river, but did not raised it to his lips. "Seems," he confirmed detachedly.

Liara watched him for a long moment, and wondered what had made him so inclined towards silence. She still thought he looked vaguely colourless, as though he had been bleached by long hours in the Wasteland like so many bones, his hair wheat-bleach rather than truly blonde and his eyes a pale scorpion-grass green, the moonlight making the lines of his face look somehow softer and the shadows under his eyes much darker. "Well," she said. "He seems to care about you."

He glanced at her. "You reckon?"

She could not resist the laugh at his reluctance to commit to any sentence, to weasel his way out of any confirmation, and Täj looked a little taken aback and a little gratified by her laugh. "I do," she said. "I do reckon."

Täj shrugged. "Rebellion forges tight bonds."

"Do you come from a rebel family?"

"No," Täj said simply, a little ruefully. "I do not."

Like pulling teeth, Liara thought.

She remembered realising how young the pale man was, how close in age to the Selected girls, and thinking that he might have even been younger than the King of Dust himself – or maybe, Demetri seemed older than his years. Even now, there was a sharpness and watchfulness to the way that Täj himself that Liara wasn't sure if she had just imagined the softness that had existed there only a moment before, but then he said, "I wasn't born into this. I chose it." And there it was again, that openness, that youth, that humanity that Liara rarely perceived in him, only in brief glances at the bandages under his sleeves or when he came back from a job with a bruised face.

"Do you ever regret it?"

"No." That was, Liara thought, the most decisive he had sounded all night. And he surprised her, when he returned the question. "Do you?"

She paused. Clouds curtained the stars; fish flashed argent in the water below; wind moved very gently through the grass. "What do you mean? Joining the Selection?"

"Leaving him behind. Mordred."

For a split second, she wondered if he knew more about her than he had been letting on, if she had not imagined the piercing nature of his gaze, if he had somehow managed to peer into her very mind.

"Leaving your family," Täj added. "Leaving Angeles."

"I try not to," she said, which was the closest to the truth she could allow herself to get. "Have you ever been there? Angeles?"

Something moved behind his eyes. Had she insulted him, to ask if he had visited the seat of his sworn enemy? Abruptly, Liara realised that she was sitting in the dead of the wastes in the dead of the night, and that he was the king's favourite killer and that she was the king's greatest threat in the Selection, but the expected thrum of adrenaline did not vibrate through her nerves. He would have to drown her, she thought, and he could have done that before they had talked at all.

"A long time ago."

"When this is all over," Liara said. "When…. when the rebellion takes the capital. You'll see it again, I suppose. It's probably changed a lot."

Täj said, "when Mordred is dead?"

He was needling at her, she could tell that he was, but she could sense no malice behind it. He was testing her, but not to provoke a reaction, not really.

She bit down on the words that rose like bile in her throat. "I suppose so."

Sometimes, as now, the sense of loss - of missing him, of wanting to talk to him, of wanting to tell him all that had happened since she left Angeles all those long weeks ago - it was like a living animal trapped in her chest.

"You know," Täj said. "You grew up with him. You're allowed to be… not happy at the idea of his death."

Liara smiled. "Not happy?"

"_Unhappy_, then." Täj rolled his eyes. "It's a miracle I speak English at all, at this point."

He offered Liara a cigarette, and after a moment's hesitation, she drew one. His hand cupping hers as he light it was much gentler than she had expected, and warmer as well. Looking at Täj, Liara had always thought he would be cold to the touch, like blood did not run in his veins.

She inhaled, and exhaled, quite smoothly and quite grateful that it was smoothly, for she would have been embarrassed to hack up a cough in front of the pale man. "Because you're an Anchorite?"

He sounded almost insulted. "Anchorites speak English."

She laughed. "Okay, then, because you've spent so long… out with the wolves?" She raised her eyebrow and exhaled again, the smoke dancing as charcoal wisps across the surface of the river. It was oddly sweet to the taste, she thought, which might go some way to explaining Täj's scent.

His voice was rueful. "That's one way to describe Vardi Tayna."

That brought up another question, one that Liara wasn't sure she wanted to ask, not when they seemed to have eke out some semblance of friendship here in the dark, smoking in secret like two rebellious teenagers, like she and Mordred had done when they were thirteen or fourteen and not entirely sure what they were rebelling against. She had always wondered if Demetri would have joined them, if he hadn't been taken, or if his more serious, sombre attitude would have precluded such frivolousness. Liara had always regretted that she and Mordred had drifted in later years; she had wondered, too, if that could have been avoided if Demetri had still been around to bind them together, or if maybe the only bond they had shared for all that time was their shared grief and sense of loss.

She wondered Täj and Vardi Tayna had snuck their first cigarettes together just the same, furtively, waiting for the General to catch them. She wondered if they had done other first things together, and then wondered why she was wondering, when the night was so dark and Täj was so quiet and still and warm beside her.

Instead she said, "do you remember, the first day at Raphael's, I asked you if Täj was your first name or your last name? And you said..."

"Most recent."

"Yeah." Liara cocked her head. "Will you tell me another one?"

She sensed, more than saw, that he had smiled again. "Another name?"

"Is that inappropriate?"

"It's… intimate."

Liara remembered Vardi Tayna being sconced for forgetting which name she was using and berating her lover for talking about some other girl. She wasn't sure she could see the intimacy in it, if they could be shed so easily, like skins from a snake. "Well," she said. "You don't have to tell me."

But when she risked a glance over at him, he was thoughtful. "I was Hector," he said finally. "For a while."

"Hector?" She couldn't imagine him as a Hector.

"It means _to restrain_."

"Why did you need that name?"

"There's comfort," he said, "in being someone else for a little while."

Liara could not help but wonder if that was why Demetri avoided her so carefully, accorded her so little time, doled in such tiny helpings. If he had revelled in being someone else, here, in this rebellion, and if her arrival had been the uncomfortable reality of his past catching up with him, a perennial invisble noose around his neck to match the scar that Täj wore on his throat.

Well, she thought, being a king was not meant to be a comfortable job. But the idea that it might be so simple, that he had not forgotten but wished not to remember, that he had enjoyed being someone other than the Demetri she had known… that hurt, but in a slow sting, like a papercut. She was the king's greatest threat in this Selection, she thought again, and reviled by his followers... all because she had known and loved him once.

She wondered if they were all so afraid of being known, of being loved.

She thought, not for the first time, that she didn't have to wonder when it came to Täj.

Somehow, she just knew.


	22. Fearing a Feather to the Earth

**Chapter 21****: Fearing a Feather to the Earth**

* * *

_But love travels like a rumor here,_  
_A skeleton of something more._

\- Ryan O'Neal

* * *

On his way through the bunker that had once housed four of the Selected but now felt more like some sort of military ghost town, the last thing Demetri was expecting to see was a member of his Selected that he had half-expected might have been eliminated without his being told – certainly he had not heard much about this girl for the past few weeks, though truth be told, for the past few weeks he had not heard from many of them.

He paused, about a foot away from where Marjorie was sitting on a hard chair outside the room. "Ah. Lady Velmudez."

"Your Highness."

She moved as though to stand and courtesy, but Demetri quickly waved away such efforts and, with only a moment's pause, moved to take the seat next to her, kicking up one foot to rest on his knee and relaxing back into the chair like a man who had not rested for several days. "Dare I ask what you're doing here?"

"If I knew," Marjorie said, shutting the notebook on her lap. "I'd tell you."

"You know, we never did get that date," Demetri said with a fond smile.

"You're a busy man. I understand entirely."

He tapped the cover of her notebook. "Thiago has put you to work?"

Her voice was wry. "I volunteered." She shrugged. "Doing my part for the rebellion."

"And the rebellion thanks you."

Marjorie flipped the pen in her hand and looked on the verge of saying something – of asking something – of asking something about _Cor__ – _when Thiago pushed open the door to the conference room, what had once been the personal office of some Crown general or other, and said, "we're ready for you, your Majesty." He glanced at Marjorie and said, "_quédate ahí y grita si ves a alguien_."

"_Lo tengo_," the girl replied and added, "it was a delight to see you again, your Majesty."

"And you, Lady Velmudez. Let it not be so long again between our meetings."

Thiago was quite sharp with the way he closed the door between them, softening only slightly as he gestured for Demetri to join the majority of High Command at the table in the centre of the room. Only a few unfamiliar faces – the war was going well, for once, and High Command rarely got involved on the frontlines anyway. Devery was there in image only, her picture flickering uncertainly on the small screen set at the tail of the table, and Bernard Givre looked as though he wanted to be anywhere other than here. Uzokuwa was casting inauspicious looks at the General's successor, a man whose name Demetri had yet to learn in the last two weeks that he had held that position. Nonetheless, they exchanged brief greetings and Demetri took his seat at the head of the table, between Thiago and the man in the grey suit who represented the colonies in the east.

In recent weeks, the meetings had included fewer and fewer of the Inner Circle, in favour of a greater presence of High Command. He wasn't entirely sure if that spoke more to their increased trust in Demetri, or their decreased trust in the Circle. Whatever it was, Demetri missed the scratch of Täj's handwriting in the corner, he missed Uzohola's focus on the humanistic perspective, he missed Wick's ability to parse through all the bullshit Givre and Devery would throw at them at the meeting's preamble.

He missed when the General would have walked him through all of this with simple terms.

"Wait," Demetri said, shaking his head. "Can you use small words?"

"We have hacked into the Crown's missile system on the edge of Fennley," Thiago said. "Courtesy of information from our own lovely Vardi Tayna and some brave conduct from boots on the ground."

"Malone," Uzokuwa said softly. "Smith. Weston."

"So what are we blowing up?" Bernard Givre bit out his words, sharp and curt.

"It needs to be symbolic," Devery said thoughtfully. "We won't get anywhere near anything that's _actually _strategically important, so making an impact is what matters."

"They'll retaliate."

Uzokuwa said, "the Saharan ambassador has extended an invitation to the one true king of Illeá to go to Maṣr on a state visit. It'll add legitimacy, and make sure Demetri is out of range for any response."

"And the Selection?"

Uzokuwa shrugged. "Mansa Inkosi Enhle has four wives. I'm sure he would be fine with Demetri bringing a few girls with him, to ensure their safety and to ensure we don't lose more time."

"What are we down to," Bernard said, and Demetri winced to hear the word _we_. "There's the Yukimura girl, Lee's daughter, that woman from the Axiom, Bataar Altai's girl..."

"Saran," Devery corrected him. "The farmer, the spy, the rebel." She ticked them off on her hands.

Bernard nodded. "My count is seven, _oui_? Too many to bring into another nation's hospitality, especially if we're trying to make a good impression.

The General's successor was curt. "Right. Cut the farmer, cut the Mongolian, cut the Gildas girl..."

Demetri said, "I haven't spoken to Elizabeth Tucker once. I know you tire of these petty issues, Bernard, but the integrity of the Selection has suffered enough."

Devery said, "lose the Altai connection? Just as Mordred brings the other twin into his Selection? How would that look?"

Thiago said, his voice soft, "don't call her the Gildas girl."

The rest of High Command shifted uncomfortably around the table.

"Alright." Bernard steepled his fingers. Demetri knew if he had truly been set on any of those decisions, he would not have been so easily deterred. He had thrown out those names on purpose, to measure their reactions to them. "The rebel, then. Atiena Morris. We can retain her as a footsoldier - Uzokuwa, are you happy to accept her into your command?"

When he smiled, Uzohola's twin stretched his scar wide, like a mouth mimicking his smile precisely. "I've been waiting since the day she arrived."

"Excellent. That's six. We need to keep Vardi Tayna." Demetri threw Bernard a piercing look that went unnoticed. "We need to keep Liara Lee." He looked at Demetri. "Any personal favourites?"

Demetri thought fast about the girls who would not be retained in the Selection for strategic reasons. Did he have any favourites? Could he, knowing them so little? It was more a question of those who would not otherwise get a chance. "Yue," he said immediately. "Eden."

"The Lahela girl is doing good work," Bernard agreed. "And the Yukimura girl is trending very positively amongst the civilians. And then Saran, while Naran is in the Crown Selection."

"Elizabeth Tucker?"

Bernard flicked his fingers at Demetri. "Have a quick chat with her at the Layeni festival, give her something to tell the folks at home about how wonderful our prince is, and we'll book five tickets for five girls to the Federation."

Demetri set his jaw, but did not argue. "Anything else?"

Uzokuwa leaned forward in his seat and said, "I need you to extend my powers. To root out this rat of ours. Whoever killed this girl."

Bernard narrowed his eyes. "What are you suggesting?"

"He's suggesting a witch hunt," Devery said derisively.

"A young girl was murdered," Demetri said, his voice cold and sharp. "After we brought her into our protection. After we promised her we would keep her safe." He thought of the night they had lain on the roof of his car and watched the safehouse vanish into so much light and dust and debris, and wondered if caring for her even a tiny bit had been the cause of her death. If, in being vulnerable, he had made her vulnerable as well. "Uzokuwa. Do whatever you need to do."

Bernard, his eyes fixed on Demetri with a laser focus, said, "and the missile?"

Thiago said, "there's a military museum in Waverly dedicated to Set Dunin."

Uzokuwa said, "Ysabel's got a spare house out in Clermont."

Devery said, "the Axiom's headquarters isn't going to have an missile defence system."

The General's successor said, "we'll hit the Axiom, hit the Maxon Bridge in Carolina, hit one of the military installations near our border in the north." He smiled grimly. "Let's put the fear of God into them."

"Please," Demetri said, his voice sounding brittle even to his own ears. "Call me Demetri."

* * *

The main thoroughfare of Layeni was known as the Anfractuous Way, and in her time living with Raphael, Yue had come to know it well. All roads in Layeni led to the clocktower eventually, but the Anfractuous Way wove its way there languidly, over a set of humpback brick bridges which hung above the rushing river slicing through the heart of the town. At least, it usually rushed – the river had been stilled by frost, the bare bones of the sakura trees on either side reaching over its frozen surface as though to throw its shadow to the other bank.

Yue had come to know it well, but this evening, it had been utterly transformed into a processional route. The trees and the street lamps had been laced and overlaced with lights, many of them just the cheap plastic o ones with bleach-white light imported from New Asia, so that from a distance when you looked over the zig-zagging bridges of the Way, it was for the briefest moment believable that the whole village had been hoisted into the air and left to settle down amongst the stars. Overhead, the white stars seemed as bright as they had ever been in the Wastelands, the constellations laced and overlaced with the softest shadows of opalescent clouds.

And the whole place was filled with people, more people than Yue could ever remember seeing in Layeni at one time, seeming as it always did to be a placid place with an almost sleepy heart. Raphael had said that this was the most anticipated occasion in Layeni, and indeed beyond, for many of the Kingdom's citizens and the Wasteland inhabitants would arrive in town for some amount of time during the following days, be it to enjoy the festivities themselves or to make as much money as they could out of it. To look at the little bunches of people moving about the bridges and the cobbelled paths, Yue thought that, tonight at least, it was mostly people here to celebrate. In fact, she thought, as Raphael shut the door behind her and took Agares' hand, though they were arranged in tight groups, it was apparent that most of the people in the town were divided again into pairs, lovers with their arms looped around one another's waists quite lazily, spouses with their fingers intertwined, paramours pressing lips against forehead and hair and lips. Yue couldn't deny that it all made her heart ache, just a little bit.

She had stayed up all night reading her latest book – _Мастер и Маргарита_, a small red-covered tome that had arrived to Raphael's house bound in brown paper and twined with butcher's string, with the now-expected little white note attached to its face:

_my dearest, Yue,_

_Klahan once said to me that he dreamed we would create a world in which we never had need nor cause for a visit from our very own Professor Woland, but to tell you the truth I'm not sure he ever read the whole book in full, for having read it myself some many years ago in the back of some munitions truck with only my own thoughts for company – well, and Täj, but that amounts to the same thing as my own thoughts I feel – I was more struck by the purity of the love Bulgakov portrayed, and wondered for many years if this was a flight of fancy on his part… I still believe it to be so, but it makes for a nice story, and a nice dream, and Margarita an excellent heroine for a story of this sort – even if I know you will have many thoughts about the ending!_

_I still disagree with you about the __themes in Tiyiyu Tarīki, by the way __(and no, this isn't about the chapter about the eye surgery and I'd thank you not to mention it)__ and it really is starting to look like you won't be able to change my mind because I have spent quite some time turning it all over… if you think Masiteri was saying that personal happiness is a hollow pursuit then I wonder what you made of the conclusion of Jegina's storyline. Is it not fairer to conclude the author was saying that some things are simply more important and virtuous than self-centred goals, no matter how deserved – like, say, the preservation of one's culture or caring for one's ailing parents in the middle of a civil war?_

_Enjoy the Layeni Festival as best you can, darling. It was always my favourite time of year as a child – though of course a young boy was probably utterly ignorant of the best parts of such an occasion. _

_お体を大切に。 _

_ディミトリ_

She had expected, at some point, over these past few weeks, that it would ease – the tightness in her chest that persisted from first sight of the parcel until she had read to the very last stroke of his pen, and sometimes for long moments afterwards, if he had phrased something in such a way that it left some ambiguity, some question over how he felt, some insinuation that he had tired of their correspondence and yet every time she sent a book and a note, she received a book and a reply and it was becoming clear that, some time in between setting up a new nation and fighting a war, he was finding the time to read at her suggestion, to consider her thoughts, to finagle some inside jokes almost without her realising.

Without him laying eyes upon her for many, many weeks, she felt quite seen.

And folded between the notes had been a pressed, dried flower – Yue had recognised from the bright pink of its petals that it was what her mother would have called an _ume _blossom, or, that is, six of them strung together like a shortened necklace, a short chain of flowers about the length of her hand. She had shown it, quite shyly, to Vardi Tayna later that evening, and not mentioned its origin, for fear the other girl might tease. Without looking at it, Vardi Tayna had said, "it's an _ai-katean_. Men give them to their women during the festival – or, the women they favour."

"Like a corsage?"

"Sort of like a corsage, but worn in the hair." Vardi Tayna had glanced at Yue with something approaching pity turning down the corners of her mouth, making the pretty girl appear quite plain. "Yours is beautiful, though."

Yue had heard the meaning behind her words, but had pushed for an explanation as she had learned to do with the strange girl from the wastes. "...is yours beautiful as well?"

Vardi Tayna's gift from Demetri had been a similar chain, formed of tiny yellow hydrangeas, no larger than Yue's thumbnail, and bound at its ends by nettles, as Yue's had been bound by ivy. "Yours is prettier," the spy girl had said, seeing the look on Vardi Tayna's face. "I think he felt obligated – we've known each other so long."

"It's something you give to friends, then?"

The one thing that Yue was grateful for was that Vardi Tayna did not usually spare her feelings with regards to questions such as these. "No," the other girl said, "it's not something you give to friends." She shrugged. "But, you know. It's the Selection. He doesn't see any of us as friends, really."

And, Yue had thought, Vardi Tayna was right. The _ai-katean _that Demetri had given her was much prettier than the one he'd given Tayna. The afternoon that followed, while they were getting ready for the festival, Vardi Tayna had shown her how she should wear it in her hair, setting it like a crown over the elegant knot of hair the other girl had woven at the nape of Yue's neck, and Yue had been quietly delighted to see that the colour matched perfectly the pink _yukata _that Agares had presented her with at breakfast that morning.

"I hope you like it," the watchmaker had said shyly, "I had Mrs Watanabe down the road help me with it, and you mentioned at the market you liked this fabric..." and Yue had been unable to hold back the tiny tears that had welled up along the line of her eye to think that a woman who had once been an utter stranger had gone to such effort and bother for her when her own parents had never treated her as anything other than a doll to dress up and pose this way and that.

"I _love_ it," she had told Agares, and had honestly meant it, but in the quiet crampedness of the little cozy room she now shared with Tayna, the garment had begun to look smaller and tighter and narrower until Yue had to run to the bathroom and waste all of Liara's good cooking from earlier in the morning.

They'd been sharing a room long enough now that Tayna knew not to ask, only helped her with her belt – an _obi_, she had told Tayna, delighted she could recall the word, while she sensed more than saw the other girl roll her dark eyes at this pronouncement – and fixed the chain in her hair and disappeared into the bathroom to put on her own finery. As close to finery as Tayna ever got, that was to say, although Yue suspected the Wasteland style hewed closer to this: a knit sweater in shades of apricot and a black a-line skirt that came to mid-thigh. In Whites, Yue thought, she would have epitomised casual chic. Here in Layeni, she was beginning to suspect that Tayna would look in place, with her slightly dishevelled hair and her ragged bangs, while Yue would look rather overwrought in her yukata.

Tayna could clearly tell some sorts of thoughts were stirring in her, because she threw the yellow hydrangea _ai-katean _at her and said, "fair is fair", and that meant Yue had something entirely new to worry about, namely, where to place the chain. She settled for weaving it along the side, so that it looked as though it were almost dripping from her head, and was gratified when Tayna glanced in the mirror and pronounced it _good enough_.

Saran and Liz had been told to come to the house to walk down to the Anfractuous Way together, so the girls from Raphael's house stood together while they waited, and looked out over the town. Agares had made new dresses for Liara and Atiena as well, and it was startlingly apparent that both of them had been just as touched by this gesture as Yue had been. She supposed there wasn't usually occasion for new clothes for a girl who ran with a militia in war-torn Tammins, but the way Liara had reacted – tightening her jaw, and looking away, like she wasn't sure if she would cry or scream – had surprised Yue a little. She wasn't sure she understood; she wasn't sure she was meant to.

Atiena had disassembled her chain of blue borage flowers into their individual blossoms, and studded her afro with them. She wasn't wearing a dress, like the other girls, but a jumpsuit that left her strong arms – and much of her cleavage – bare. It was brighter than anything Yue had ever seen the rebel girl wear, in vibrant shades of yellow and maroon that made her dark skin appear even richer, that made the tiny gold flecks in her eyes appear to glow luminscent.

The dress that Agares had made for Liara had long lace sleeves and a short skirt and, Yue only noticed once they were out in the air, a delicately formed lace hood that, worn over her inky dark hair, made her look at once ethereal and exotic, like she might go to join the stars or drown you with her kiss and hadn't quite decided which one would suit her better. She had, Yue saw, a chain of zinnia wound tightly around her wrist.

Well, that was to be expected. This was a Selected – Demetri had to treat the other girls fairly as well. Still, it stung ever so slightly to see Liz and Saran coming up the path with flowers in _their _hair as well, because Atiena had enjoyed that day-long date with the king and Vardi Tayna was his friend and Liara Lee had known him before he was taken, but Yue wasn't sure he had ever even spoken to Liz or Saran before.

But that was, she told herself, petty jealousy, and so she quelled it even as it threatened to rise in her chest. Besides, she thought, gazing at the two girls from the orphanage, truth be told Demetri would have been an idiot if he didn't favour one of them over Yue herself. They were _gorgeous_, no more so tonight than ever and yet the gentle caress of dusk seemed to make Saran's face appear even more delicate, her eyes even brighter. She was wearing what Yue was sure must have been a very plain _deel_, made of navy fabric with strands of gold running through it, bound at the waist and wrists by similar gold cord, and had a gold pin in her hair keeping the pin-curls to one side. She had laced her chain – a dark green orchids, Yue noted – around the pin, and maybe split in two, because she had a simple chain of ox-eye daisies wrapped around her ankle as well, like a flower-child might. Or maybe that was something the children in the orphanage had made her, Yue thought, and wondered if the festival was for lovers, specifically, or for love, more generally.

Saran came up the path to hug Yue tightly, not seeming to care if she mussed her hair or her dress, and enthused, "you look _amazing_."

"_Me_? Saran, _you_ -"

"Oh, don't be silly, Devery brought me this from up north." Saran brushed at it dismissively, but Yue could see in her eyes how much the gesture had meant to hear. It must have been made of real Mongolian silk. "Does everyone know Elizabeth Tucker? Liz, do you know everyone?"

Yue had seen the girl around the safehouse in the wastes, where she mainly hung around quite quietly with Lissa and tended to the plants in the sparse garden in front of the house, but until this moment she had not really _met _her. The girl from Midston had a softer face than a lot of the girls in the Selection, with something gentle about the curve of her cheeks and the way she smiled, particularly the way that she half-closed her aquamarine eyes when she did so. She was in a floral sundress, with her long vibrant red hair cascading over both shoulders, and had arranged her _ai-katean _along the crown of her head, like a tiara, so that it almost looked as though the blossoms were sprouting wild from her skull. Purple mallow, Yue thought. She mainly knew the flowers because of her painting, but this was one that her mother had grown in the garden when she was a young girl. It had always struck Yue as looking like a hopeful kind of flower, if flowers could be anthropomorphised in such a manner.

Yue found herself touching her own flower chain with a certain degree of insecurity and uncertainty as Raphael said, "I hope you girls enjoy the festival." She was not wearing any flower chain – that was for courting, she had explained to the girls over breakfast that morning – but Agares had made her a new watch to celebrate the event, and she glanced at it now as she said, "Demetri has lifted the curfew for tonight so that you can enjoy yourselves, but please stay safe. Uzokuwa and Wick have men patrolling, but if you're in any doubt, come back here or come find Agares or myself."

"And have _fun_." Agares was beaming. "Remember – what happens in Layeni stays in Layeni..."

Raphael feigned horror with her wife, and feinted as though to cover her mouth. "Alright, don't get them into too much trouble… girls, get out of here before she puts ideas in your head."

Atiena laughed and fell back to walk alongside Liz and ask how life was these days at the orphanage, with Liara trailing beside them, rather lost in her own world; Saran linked arms with Yue, and then, with some trepidation, Yue linked arms with Vardi Tayna and the latter girl said, with some amusement, "it's like you _want _to lose your arm."

"Oh," Saran said, "it's a festival, VT. Lighten up for one night?"

VT said, "only one person calls me VT, you know that?" and Yue had to swallow back the giggle that rose in her throat to see the way that this provoked the other northern girl to blush dark and red.

"Three now, VT," Yue said, feeling quite daring, and felt rather rewarded by the exhalation of air that meant either that Tayna found it vaguely amusing or realised there was no points in prolonging such an inane conversation.

"Alright, Yukimura." She sounded amused, anyway.

As they drew down towards the centre of the town, Yue began to catch snippets of the delicate string music floating above the spires and tiles of the village. There was something bittersweet about it, something as hopeful as the flowers in Liz's chain. Bittersweet, and yet as they came closer to the square, the sweet began to overpower the bitter, and she began to see how the crowds were arranged, so that they could move along the Way in a sinuously smooth manner, never passing the same person twice except by pure luck – or, she supposed, by fate. As they drew closer to the clocktower, she noticed that there was a dark silhouette waiting for them on the wall, and her heart skipped a beat automatically at the thought that the King of Dust might have come all this way just to spend an evening with her – well, with them.

She was disabused of this notion quickly when Vardi Tayna ripped her arm from Yue's grip, pushed through the crowd of Selected girls and took off running. She sprinted a few dozen feet and then threw herself into a flip, catching herself on her hands and somersaulting once, twice, three times, her movements as elegant and contained as anything Yue could do on the ice, before Wickanninish Harjo, who had been waiting for them on the low wall by the clocktower, jumped forward and caught her in his arms, and spun her, making it look choreographed. Maybe it had been.

"There's a dance competition starting in three minutes." he said. "Are you in or out?"

"Baby," Vardi Tayna said. "You do me a dishonour by even asking."

Wick shouted at the figure moving down the path after them, "I'm stealing your girl!"

"Not my girl," Täj replied, quite wryly, and Yue could not help but notice how Liara glanced to him at that pronouncement. She could not help but notice, furthermore, that he seemed to have gotten into Demetri's closet while the other man was gone – a pale green sweater than matched his eyes, and dark pants that looked cleaner and more well-kept than absolutely anything Yue had glimpsed the pale man in for all of these long weeks under the same roof.

Wick took Vardi Tayna's hand, and the two disappeared into the crowd of colours. Yue squeezed Saran's hand, and Saran smiled at the other girl's obvious sympathy.

"I can't dance," she confessed shyly, and then, dropping her voice very soft so that only Yue could hear her. "Wick asked me to be his partner four days ago. I had to turn him down if he wanted to win."

"You're an absolute _minx_," Yue said softly, and was rewarded with one of Saran's bright smiles, almost bright and white enough to absolutely eclipse the stars themselves. "Are you two..."

"I don't even know," Saran said. "Are we two."

"He'd be an idiot," Yue said.

"He'd be a traitor," Saran reminded her.

"He'd be an idiot if he didn't realise you were _worth it_," Yue said, and laughed as Atiena glanced over her shoulder and said, "she's absolutely right, you know."

"You always gang up on me," Saran complained. "I miss Cor."

"Just because you and Cor used to gang up against Yue," Atiena said, amusedly.

"A valid pastime," Saran insisted and looked to Liz for some support – the farmer girl had her hands up as though pleading ignorance, shaking her head to tell Saran not to drag her into it.

Liara was still watching in the direction that Tayna and Wick had gone. "Should we go watch that trainwreck, or…?"

She turned to look at Täj, and Yue watched the realisation flicker across her face that the pale man had meandered off, in that way that he had; Yue had never seen the king's executioner move quickly, and yet he was always either there or gone, never arriving and never leaving. It was mildly fascinating, Yue thought, when she allowed herself to think about it.

Liara, never one to be caught off-guard, flicked her eyes over to Yue in the second that she realised Täj was gone, and continued quite smoothly as though she had been talking to the northern girl all along. "Or should we do some dancing ourselves?"

Yue paused, and was glad that she did not have to answer before Liz, looking relieved to have an excuse not to take a side between the mock-argument going on between Atiena and Saran, said, "Let's do some dancing. I've barely seen the town."

"Dancing," Yue agreed, and Liara said, "dancing it is."

* * *

Surprising no one, Wick and Vardi Tayna did not win the dance competition. They probably could have, Wick said to no-one in particular, but the music hadn't suited them and the tempo had been off and, anyway, they had wanted to seem humble. They had remained on the cobbles, where Wick was pirouetting the dark Selected girl with the ease of one who has danced a thousand thousand steps with his partner. She was small enough that Wick could put an arm around her waist and pull her into the air, and she could spin, as though the material world had no claim upon her. She wrapped her legs around Wick's waist and he dipped her dramatically, left and then right, so enthusiastically that Uzohola thought he was going to crack her head off the pavement. There was laughter, and as Vardi Tayna somersaulted back to stand on her own two feet, there was a clamour by the young girls of the orphanage to be Wick's next partner. He pulled a little five-year-old with gapped teeth to dance with him next, and Tayna clearly turned to scan the crowd, but before her eyes could fall on the tables at the side where Uzohola was sitting with Xïta and some of the other soldiers, she was spun by one of the villagers and swept back into the heave-and-hum of the crowd, lost like a leaf in a spinning gust of wind.

The chair beside her scraped loudly as it was pulled back, and Uzohola grinned to see Demetri hastily sliding into the seat, looking as though he had sprinted there from Angeles. "Your Highness," she murmured, and the murmur was echoed by all around the table, much to Demetri's obvious irritation.

"Yes, yes." He looked at Uzohola and poked at the bright blue mark on her cheek, in the shape of lips. "Couldn't even wait for me to get the party started, huh?"

Uzohola didn't need to look to know that Xïta was shrinking into his seat on the other side of the group, with the air that he would rather the earth would swallow him than to have Demetri look over at him in that moment. But, quite thankfully, the king was more focused on the dancers in the square in front of him, where men and women spun and met and separated and met again. "You're late," she said. "You can't expect us to wait for you."

"I'm the king. I can expect _exactly_ that." Uzohola laughed and patted his cheek and he said, "where are they?" and darted his eyes about, rather as a hunted animal might. He and Täj were dressed like mirror images of each other, she noted with some amusement, but for the fact that Demetri was wearing a much richer moss-green colour, that better suited his eyes; he ran his hands through his hair as he looked about, and more out of habit than any true urge to correct, Uzohola knocked his hand out of the way and carefully rearranged the loose strands of hair that had fallen forward to cover his eyes.

"Out and about," Uzohola replied, "Here and there and everywhere."

"You're doomed," Xïta said helpfully.

"Oh, that's been apparent for a while." Demetri made an obvious gesture of looking at Uzohola's ring-finger to get back at Xïta for this comment, and was rewarded with another groan from the man as he put his head in his hands, and Uzohola smacked her king very gently on his shoulder. "_Ow_."

"It's a lover's festival," she said. "Go… _love_."

He pulled a face.

"It's the Elite," Uzohola said. "Whether you get a say in it or not, you're going to end up with one of these girls. Might as well get to know them."

"I could just go find Täj," Demetri said, thoughtfully. "Whatever rooftop he's moping about on."

"I'm seriously concerned," Uzohola said, "that this whole… charade could have been avoided if you two would just marry each other already."

"Wouldn't work," Demetri said, quite casually. "Tayna would get too jealous."

"Of you or Täj?"

"You know there's no good answer to that question." Demetri clapped Uzohola on her shoulder. "There's a beautiful fireworks show on at midnight. Very romantic. Raphael and Agares got engaged during it, a few years back."

Xïta said, through gritted teeth, "I've got the hint."

"I guess we'll see you there," Uzohola said sweetly. "You and…?"

Demetri sighed. "In the good old days we'd have been by the river at midnight." The General would have arrived only to rebuke them for being insular, but for those moments they would be complete and together – Wick knee-deep in water saying something obscure about something esoteric, Vardi Tayna and Täj sitting on a rock nearby, smoking like the world was about to end, Uzohola and Thiago and Demetri drinking on the banks, passing a vodka bottle back and forth between them and saying nothing about nothing at all, just words, just idle chatter, almost a stream-of-consciousness.

"There are good days to come," Uzohola said. "You only get so many festivals before you're tied down." She threw Xïta a wink. "Enjoy them."

"Wise girl."

He paused. His eyes traced over a pretty red-haired girl in a floral sundress who was moving from one side of the square to the other. Elizabeth, her name was, Uzohola thought, Elizabeth Taylor. Or was it Tucker?

Demetri said, "you know we've got an invitation to go to the Saharan Federation for some state visit?" She could feel him watching her carefully for her reaction; after all, Uzohola had been born and raised in the Federation, not in its capital of al-Qāhirah but in its largest city of Bàmako, whose name her twin brother had tattooed on his bicep: **ߓߊߡߊߞߐ** . Well, not entirely, for the twins had come to Illéa when they were no older than eight years old, accompanying their father, who had been bodyguard to the ambassador. The ambassador had been funnelling money and arms to the rebels in the south; Uzanikela Ndlovukazi had died when Illéan forces stormed the Saharan embassy in search of incriminating documents. After that, Uzohola and Uzokuwa had been essentially raised by the rebellion - it was the regional leader in Panama, a fellow Saharan immigrant, that had given Uzohola her new name when she began to publicly transition into female in her adolescence. She still dreamed of her homeland, sometimes, when she wasn't too tired to dream. "What do you think?"

Uzohola paused. She had been promised the role of Administer for Overseas once the Kingdom in Exile had been established, and considered this question something of a test for her talents. "Ehle is not without his controversies."

"Neither am I," Demetri pointed out.

"But he's definitely not the worst of the mansas..." Uzohola nodded. "I think it would be good. Drum up some foreign support, show us making a stand, put it in the Crown's face." She paused. Xïta looked at her like he knew what she was thinking. "I'll reach out to Mansa Ehle, see if he will invite some foreign dignitaries. Get some New Asian contacts." It would be nice to go home, she thought. She wondered if Atiena had ever seen the land of their ancestors. She wondered if Atiena even knew where the land of her ancestors was. "Connect with some money and some industry..."

"We're not looking to run guns," Demetri reminded her. "Just to… make some friends."

"_You_ need to go make friends," Uzohola said fondly. "And stop hiding over here beside me."

"And leave the gun running to you?"

"I thought that wasn't what we were doing."

"That's what we're saying we're not doing."

"But it's not what we're not doing?"

"If we find some guns," Demetri said softly, "we can run them. Just a little."

Uzohola clasped her hands over her heart. "_Nkosana yami_, you know how to make a girl swoon."

* * *

"What are these?"

Eden and Pa had just been standing on the very edge of town, at the end of the Anfractuous Way, where young people either took the opportunity to dart off into the darkness with their newfound love or turned and disappeared back into the rattle-and-hum of the procession leading back to the clocktower, which had been lit up for the evening, all golden, like an ancient spire in some European city. Eden had been prevaricating on the edge of the procession, wishing without daring to wish that some familiar face might appear from the crowd and haul her in, so that she did not need to arrange her features into her usual practiced smile and did not need to watch her every action and word for the hours that would ensue.

A bowl had been thrust into her hands by nearby revellers, Anchorites that she vaguely recognised from the market, and as she looked about she could see that similar silver bowls were being passed hand-to-hand by the crowd, and here and there she could see one person reach to hand the bowl to the next and then pause, charmed, and search for some excuse to speak to them again, now that the bowl had passed on and disappeared into the throng. It was cute, Eden thought. She was beginning to see the charm of this little event.

When she looked within the bowl, she found that it was filled with small, slightly wizened, berries, like dried sultanas or goji, coloured in every shade imagined under the sun – silvers and blues, reds and golds, greens and purples and every colour in between. Pa said, "they're to mark," and when Eden looked at her in some confusion, the older woman gestured broadly and Eden realised that those who had taken them were chewing them – like tobacco – and those who were chewing them had stained their lips in the bright colours of the berries, and those who had stained their lips, more often than not, had stained the skins of others, and Eden almost smiled to realise that it was the small-town, Wasteland equivalent of a gossip column. She could almost imagine how the young people of Layeni would talk about it – _so, who's the silver? Red _and _green, someone's been busy… I thought Zëx was wearing blue tonight?_

"I understand," she said, and, feeling almost daring, reached into the bowl delicately to pick out her favourite colour, a warm sunburst orange. It was oddly flavourful – not orange-flavoured, as she had rather intuitively expected, but something sweet, like a peach, mixed with something almost spicy, like the touch of cinnamon and ginger. It was nice

She offered it to Pa, almost teasingly, and the old woman passed it on to the next group that were passing them. "Raphael has said that you can stay at her house tonight," Pa said. "I will feed the cat."

Eden almost laughed at how blunt the widow always was. "Thank you, _pa_."

"And I will come to pick you up tomorrow."

"Thank you, _pa_."

"Tell Demetri I love him."

Eden hadn't expected such a sudden moment of vulnerability from the grizzled, grey-haired farmer. "I'll share the sentiment," she said. "I…. don't know if it will mean as much coming from me."

Pa clasped her shoulder briefly and said, "enjoy yourself," and Eden said, "travel safe," and the two of them nodded at one another and Eden watched as Pa departed. Was it sad, she wondered, to attend a festival devoted to lovers when you could not even bury your own husband? Or maybe it was nostalgic. She could not imagine Huhyn and Klahan as a young, handsome couple, courting in public, holding hands and going on dates. She could only picture them as they appeared in the photos in Pa's house – severe and strait-laced, staring straight ahead at the camera, only their hands touching, or maybe his hand resting on her shoulder, or her hand on his leg, like they were afraid to show too much sentiment even in front of the probing eye of the lens.

Speaking of lenses, after four weeks practically attached to her camera, Eden was beginning to feel more than a little bit naked. Pa had gone to lengths to find her a nice dress for the festival, much plainer than the fare to which Eden had become accustomed as scion of the Axiom, just a simple purple bandage dress – but as she walked across the first bridge, and noticed that several other girls in the crowd were wearing the same dress, and not in different colours either, she began to relax a little. There was nothing worse than standing out, she had learned, here or in Angeles, there was little worse than drawing the eyes of others when you did not intend or need to. She felt quite invisible moving across the first bridge, and watching how the local girls spun from one partner to the next, utterly sinuous, as though it required no more effort than the river needed to flow. If the river had been flowing, she thought, because in fact it had frozen under the bridge, frozen utterly still.

And yet, it did not feel cold. Maybe that was just the press of humanity around her, the feeling of other people all around her and yet there was no crush or press, no rush, for people parted in front of her almost instinctively. She was beginning to note some of the traditions that Pa had told her about – many of the girls had flower chains in their hair, and some had more than one, one particularly pretty girl wearing six strands across her braid, her lips stained a crimson cherry-red. There were a few with none, but they didn't seem to be letting that fact hold them back as they danced and laughed and called across the frozen water to one another. In the past, Eden would have set out determined not to remain such a girl, flowerless, but a combination of two months with Pa on the farm and Demetri's _ai-katean_ of tiny orange tulips bound tightly around the ends of her Dutch braids felt like some kind of a shield against the world this evening.

She scanned the crowds for people she might recognise and found no one for a long moment until she caught sight of the familiar hot-pink colour of a certain director's waistcoat. Enyakatho had, against Eden and Wren's advice, buzzed his hair short earlier that week; she still wasn't accustomed to seeing him without his dreadlocks. He had his camera on his shoulder, but was leaning on the rail of the fourth bridge over, chatting to a group of locals with an expression that suggested he was, for once, relaxed and not _entirely _over-caffeinated. That was nice, Eden thought, for so often, sequestered as she was at the farm as she was, she only ever saw the rebels when they were working, and it often appeared that they got no chance for a rest, for some time of their own, to let their hair down – so to speak, Eden thought ruefully, looking at the hackjob Wren had executed on Enyakatho the previous Monday.

He caught her eye, and grinned, and waved, and Eden bit back a laugh to see the green marks trailing down his throat at so early a point in the night. His own lips were a hot pink, which suggested he had purposefully picked it out to match his waistcoat. It was nice to see that some people in the Wasteland were as vain as anyone in Angeles ever was.

She blew him a kiss, almost ironically, and he pretended to swoon, which made Eden laugh; she kept walking along the path, noting as she did that the distant clocktower had become eclipsed by the buildings which rose up on either side of the street which linked two of the bridges. She was about to check her watch when she was abruptly struck on the shoulder, as someone passing checked her sharply; she turned, out of instinct, to check that they were okay and cursed herself for having done so, because she found herself facing two rebels in plainclothes, broad-shouldered and glowering, the neon yellow paint on their sleeves doing little to dispel the menace that seemed to emanate from them.

"Lahela," one said, and Eden resisted the urge to swear. "Isn't it?"

_Uno, due, tre._

"Axiom," said the other. "Aren't you?"

_Quattro, cinque, sei._

"What," she said, curiosity filtering through her voice, "is an axiom?"

That gave them pause, enough that she took the opportunity to turn on her heel and stride away, moving with enough confidence that she hoped it would appear as though she was merely baffled at the whole interaction, rather than resist the urge to throttle something – or someone. However, she made it only two or three metres away before she felt a hand on her shoulder, like a vice, cracking tighter again, so tightly she had to swallow back a sound of pain, and one of the rebels said, "nah. I know a Quisling when I see one."

_Sette, otto._

Immediately, every single message that had been painted on every single _Axiom_ paper flashed through her mind, like some sort of manic slideshow: ****COLABORACIONISTAS ********SERÁN AHORCADOS, ******TRAIDORES SERÁN DEVORADOS, ****RATAS SERÁN EXTERMINADAS****. Collaborationist, traitor, rat, hanged, devoured, exterminated….**

They were drunk, she thought tersely, they must have been, because there was no way one of the rebels was here, in this dark alley, and now, during the Layeni festival, threatening one of King Demetri's Selected, not if they had any loyalty at all, not if they wanted to keep their head on their shoulders, not if she mattered at all –

Well, she thought, there's the rub.

_Nove, dieci, undi._

She set her back, and said, "listen..." but was cut off by another voice coming down the alley behind her.

"There you are, Eden." She may have only met him once, but Demetri's voice was one of those unmistakeable sounds in the world – rich and smooth and, in this moment, wonderfully soothing, one of the finest sounds she could have even dreamed of hearing. "I've been looking for you."

She felt more than saw him stand behind her and, making sure her hands did not shake as she did so, she reached back to take his hand as confidently as she could. She flashed the rebels a smile as warm she could make it, keenly aware that the bitter edge of her fear, and irritation, and relief, was curling it at the edges. "Well," she said. "Clearly I wasn't too hard to find."

"Clearly." Demetri stepped forward. "Qäv, Mikhail, I'd avoid the seventh district, if I were you. Uzokuwa won't be happy to see you in the state you're in."

Eden took a grim type of glee in the way the rebels' mouths tightened and their eyebrows furrowed at this pronouncement, their unhappiness at the sight of their king apparent in the lines of their bodies. "Thank you for the warning," Mikhail said, his voice low. "Your Highness."

Demetri smiled. "Please. You've done the same for me, Mik. Have a good night." He turned that smile on Eden, and she was reminded again just how good he was at this as he tugged on her hand. "Shall we?"

"Yes," she said, automatically. "Sounds good."

She only became acutely aware of how sweaty her hands were once they were out onto the next bridge and the locals were throwing them looks. Eden told herself that it was because of who she was with, rather than on her own merits, and to be honest, that was familiar to her – she'd been set up as the girlfriend of several prominent Angeles celebrities in her adolescence, and she had always enjoyed the feeling of invisibility that had come along with standing next to someone whose star shone so much brighter than her own. And there was, she had to admit, something unkindly enjoyable about watching how the girls around her threw Demetri admiring looks, and the way he seemed utterly oblivious to the same as he looked at Eden.

"Are you okay?"

"Oh, absolutely. They wouldn't have tried anything. Just wanted to give me a rattle."

"Yeah," Demetri said, and looked as though he did not entirely believe her, but was diplomatic enough not to say as much aloud, not when they were so surrounded by others, not when she looked so determined not to say anything to the contrary. "Well."

They looked out across the frozen water.

"I didn't think you were going to be here tonight," Demetri said, "at least, not on this side of the screen."

"Pa and Enyakatho bullied me into it."

"Good men. I approve." Demetri glanced at her. "I like the colour."

It did not escape her notice that Demetri had not appear to have picked any such coloured berry. Predictable, perhaps, but disappointing – Eden thought it would have helped, at least a little, at the end of the night, to discern where his affections might lie. Maybe that was the idea. Maybe it would have been seen as gauche, even for this strange and unusual Rebellion, for the king to be seen to have marked a half-dozen girls by the time the night was out.

"You look lovely, by the way."

"Left that a little late."

He chuckled. "Oh?"

"You should have told me I looked lovely about… a minute and a half ago." Eden was trying to hide her smile. "Just… you know. It's the little things."

"If I'd said it at the top of the conversation," Demetri said, thoughtfully. "It would have seemed like an obligation. Saying it _now _makes it seem like I mean it."

"Seem?" Eden said.

"Well," Demetri said, "I can't commit to anything too soon."

* * *

Liz's lips had stained a deep, dark green, at an early point in the night, just as Liara's had stained black, and Atiena had left a large dark blue mark on their cheeks just before disappearing off in the company of some soldiers that she had become friendly with during their time at the safehouse, cheerfully telling them that if Raphael asked them where she had been, the answer was definitely not smoking _metzliaxitia_ out by the woollen mill with Uzokuwa and some of his comrades. Liara wasn't entirely sure how to tell Atiena that hanging out with your crush's brother was not the sure route to their heart that it might seem – and oh, how it put her heart in a vice when she wondered how she might have come to that understanding – but truth be told, Atiena always seemed a little more comfortable with the rebels than with the Selected girls, no matter how thoughtful she could be with them. Liara supposed the girl from Tammins could be a little more herself around these creatures of war. It must be some comfort, to find traces of home out here in the wastes, some familiarity amongst the alien landscape of the Kingdom in Exile.

Atiena had disappeared off to the mill, and Yue had been approached shyly by the fishmonger from the market, Kün, who had sheepishly handed her a flower chain, one of the_ ai-kateans_, just like the one Demetri had sent to each girl. Liara still wasn't entirely sure what the etiquette was around these situations, for Kün had barely given Yue the chance to thank him before he was back with his Anchorite brothers in the square, clearly undergoing the usual teasing which might follow such a bold move.

Saran said, her mouth a rich gold, "don't they know she's in the Selection?"

Liz said, "why should they care?"

Liara said, "there would be worse places to settle if you were eliminated, don't you think?"

And Tayna, appearing at Liz's shoulder as though summoned by the vague prospect of bullying Yue, said, through silvered lips, "he's not ugly, Yukimura... and Anchorite guys are _great _in bed."

Saran said, a smile clearly leaking in her voice, "isn't Täj an Anchorite?"

Liara said, more to change the subject than out of actual curiosity, "what kind of flowers did he give you, Yue?"

The chain was woven out of lily-of-the-valley, a pale white blossom that complimented her pink _ai-katean _marvellously. Saran helped her to pin it into place as Yue said, quite shyly, "this isn't… you know, against the rules?"

The daisy chain around Saran's ankle seemed to suggest this was not the case. "They're just gifts. It would look really bad if you were to turn it down."

Tayna said, "you've done nothing wrong." She snapped her head at some sound that was apparently audible only to her. She had the chain from Demetri still woven where Yue had placed it, over one ear, and a new chain of forget-me-nots in the same place on the other side, so that they linked at the back, forming a colourful circlet. "Ah, _fuck_," she said, and disappeared into the crowd again. Liz looked at Liara, and raised an eyebrow.

"Vardi Tayna doesn't really play by the same rules as we do," Liara said.

"Ah," Liz said, looking a little put out at this news. Or maybe what was producing this expression on her face was the proposal occurring just a few dozen feet away, a rebel in plainclothes on one knee and his overjoyed boyfriend – now fiancé, she supposed – barely able to contain the joy reverberating through every line in his body as he pulled his lover up into a tight embrace.

Liara nudged Liz, and raised an eyebrow. The other girl nodded, but still looked rather… Liara couldn't put her finger on it. It was the expression Ysabel had worn for years after Demetri's disappearance, when she had interacted with the young children of the ambassadors or courtiers of the palace, like she was gazing at a ghost given flesh, the fragment of some idea or feeling she had lost long ago.

It occurred to Liara that she knew very little about Liz, and that it would be a very bad idea to go prying now.

"So," Saran was saying. "Do we just mill about all night?" The local girls seemed too preoccupied with their paramours, or too intimidated by the status of the Selected, to chat to them for long; the clocktower above marked that it was only just past eleven, leaving the better part of an hour until the fireworks began. That, Raphael had explained, would be the real start of the festivities – music and performances and competitions. The lead-up, as now, was a warm-up, and something for the families with younger children to participate in.

"At least for another hour." Liara glanced about. "Anyone for a drink?"

Liz smiled. "I could go for one," she said, but Yue and Saran looked less inclined.

"After last time?" Saran laughed and Yue smiled along. "I'll wait a little longer, thanks."

Liz and Liara headed back along the bridges to the bazaar in the minor courtyard, outside the town's little chapel, where they had noted earlier in the evening the presence of large barrels, apparently doling out ladlefuls of liquor for free. As they drew closer, Liara could see that the liquid contained within was as brightly and variedly coloured as the bowls of berries being passed about the crowd – some distillation of the same? She selected the black, and Liz selected the green, for there was no point in mixing shades at this early point in the night, and swapped after the first sip to confirm that both kinds tasted pretty good, all things considered.

As they were turning to go back to the northern girls, Liara paused, catching sight of the pale man over by the sixteenth bridge, the one that was only half-visible from the rest of the Anfractuous Way, smoking, and wondered, not for the first place, why the dawn of a new day had apparently shattered any camaraderie between them – for though she would not precisely call them friends, she had certainly thought their discussion by the river three nights ago had meant something more, something that meant he would act as though she were a stranger in the days that followed.

The same instinct that had guided her onto the rooftop the night of the shared dinner, the same instinct that had guided her to his bedroom door three nights ago, guided her now to say to Liz, "I'll catch up."

The Midston girl said, something like a full understanding in her eyes, "behave yourself."

"Don't I always?"

Liz handed her the cup of green liquor – "I can grab another" – and Liara moved over towards the pale man, setting her jaw as she did so, determined that, whether he liked it or not, they would at least feign civility with one another. He was her one connection to Demetri, who was her one connection to Mordred. That, at least, was worth defending.

So she opened, as she always did, in a friendly manner.

"You're always a miserable bastard, huh?"

"Wow," he deadpanned. "You pick things up quickly."

She handed him the drink, much as he had handed her the whiskey on the rooftop, and he looked only mildly suspicious at this opening volley of generosity, but quenched his cigarette against the wooden rail of the bridge and crunched it underfoot, turning so that he had his back to the river and was facing Liara; she mirrored him, and for a moment they were silent.

"I'm pretty sure," Täj said finally. "That you should be out enjoying yourself."

"I could say the same thing," Liara replied, and she thought she might have seen some trace of amusement on his lips at how she had adapted to his method of giving half-answers.

"Our positions aren't exactly… synonymous." He was turning something over in his fingers, but, given the dark, she could not quite see what it was.

"Selected and Inner Circle?"

Täj said, looking into the cup she had handed him, "what exactly do you think I do?"

She knew what he did. She didn't need to think, though the rebels sometimes, when they didn't think Demetri or Tayna were around to hear them, called him Dunin's dog, Demetri's favourite killer, the executioner in exile.

In Angeles, they called him the false king's hangman.

She supposed most people in Layeni knew these things, just as they knew to cheer when they saw Wick arriving, or to celebrate the sight of Demetri. She supposed there weren't many girls in Layeni looking for a guy like that on a night like tonight. She supposed there were a lot of idiots in Layeni.

"I mean," she said, and then didn't really have anything to say after those words had left her black lips, so that the syllables were just left hanging in the air between them, empty and hollow.

Täj seemed to understand, for he just reached forward – they tapped their cups against one another – and Liara drained hers, mostly because she expected Täj to, at least partially because she wanted to loosen her nerves and sinews, at least some small amount, enough to make these silences a little easier to fill. He laughed, and gestured that she should step closer so that he could refill her cup from the flask he kept under his jacket, and she wondered how long you would have to know this man to learn everything about him.

Those eyes... she could have sworn she was looking right at Mordred, so unreadable was this pale man. She would have opened a vein, right then and there, if she thought it would have made him speak a little more openly, as he had that night by the river, when they had achieved that pale facsimile of trust and openness.

He had a silver mark, Liara saw, just under his jaw, a little crescent moon where the skin was thinnest, very light and yet glowing minutely like stardust in the pale light of the little bulbs strung up throughout the enclosure of the bridge. And, quite without knowing why, Liara said, "isn't it miserable? To love someone who can't even pretend to love you back?"

He said, "you tell me." She thought he must have borrowed his sweater from Demetri, because he was lacking his usual sagebrush scent, that touch of wildfire which had always characterised her closest interactions with him. She wondered if this was what Demetri smelled like, and then wondered why she had wondered that, and then wondered why she had to wonder.

He handed her the thing he had been turning in his hands – a flower chain, she saw, little stars of Bethlehem knotted together– and said, "does that make it any less valuable? That it is not returned?"

"Love doesn't have… a value." She was abruptly aware of how closely they were standing together, just outside the pale white halo of light accorded by the nearby fairy-lights, just as they had been three nights ago, by the river – though of course, the stars in here were not so brilliant. Täj's eyes outshone them all.

"Of course it does." His voice was soft; when he spoke, she could feel it. "It must." She could have just tilted her head upwards and leaned a little and… "Anything people go to war over has some sort of value."


	23. With Infinite Possibility

**Chapter 22:**** With Infinite Possibility**

* * *

_Once in a while, we should look into each others eyes._  
_Otherwise, we might feel lost. I'm so glad that you are here._

\- Rinko Kawauchi

* * *

"Pa's not driving you too crazy, then?"

If there was one thing Eden appreciated, it was how Demetri never quite put a foot outside of charming. Every so often he said something that could have been construed as slightly cruel, slightly thoughtless, slightly dismissive of the woman who had raised him, and yet there was always that wryly amused note to lighten it slightly, make it seem rueful and affectionate rather than unfriendly. It was so consistent, that Eden had to wonder what was true. Did he see Pa as a mother figure, as both he and the old widow had claimed at the interview? Or was she just one of many rebels through hands he had passed during his time in captivity – and there it was, _captivity_, the trace of her mother's voice whispering softly in the corner of her mind.

In any case, it made it a little more difficult to read the man at her side as they moved through the crowds at the festival, eyes of passer-bys flicking in their direction as they passed, but it also made it a little more fun to spar with him, to consider the best reply. It was something that Eden understood, in a way that she understood very little in the Wastelands, something familiar, even if it was familiar mostly because she was utterly, totally tired of it. "Oh," she said, "I give as good as I get. I'd say we're about equal."

"Well," Demetri replied. "Her sanity has been in question for a while. Did she ever tell you what she did at the Paloma front?"

Eden quirked a smile. Pa had fought? "No?"

"Oh," he said, "that's a story for her to tell, I think. Couldn't take it away from her."

She pretended to pout. "Oh, that's cruel."

"Maybe a little. But a woman deserves to keep her secrets."

"And a man?"

"Depends on the secrets."

They crossed another bridge, the strictures of this one twined with ivy that had been dusted with some much pink and purple powder that it looked almost alien. Demetri had given her his arm, like Arjun or Milo or Uriah or any of the other Angeles boys might when they were on one of their staged dates, and pretending not to notice the photographers trailing them at a respectful distance. The only difference this time around was that she was wearing flats. Heels, she had been told, were not really rebellious. Rebels needed to be able to run. And there were no photographers here, only citizens of the so-called-true kingdom, who seemed equal parts delighted to see their king and fascinated to see him strolling with one of his Selected. She wondered if they would take this as an indication of his favour.

She wondered if she should.

She thought again of the box that she had found under the floorboards in Pa's farmhouse. A part of her ached to ask Demetri about it. A bigger part of her cautioned against it. It was too risky, and Eden could not afford to take risks. She was a cockroach, descended from cockroaches, she thought wryly – survival was all, and one did not typically survive by being curious. Here in the Kingdom, she had learned, one survived by making oneself useful, not by causing trouble. And such questions _would _cause trouble, she mused, that was inevitable. She couldn't imagine the King of Dust would be too happy to realise that the scion of the Crown's favoured mouthpiece had found a collection of his private letters.

She and Demetri passed Wren, one of the announcers from the rebel Report who moonlighted as Enyakatho's camerawoman when resources were low. Her mouth matched her bright blue hair – the stain glowed slightly as she gave Eden a wide grin, lifting one hand to wave with an enthusiasm that suggested liquor. After her run-in with the rebels earlier, it was gratifying to be on the receiving end of such an affectionate gesture from one of their comrades. It reminded Eden that not all of her work had been in vain. Wren had been exceedingly suspicious of her during her first few weeks with Pa, and had shown her nothing but kindness in the weeks since. She had turned a few opinions, she told herself, and one at a time was all you could really try to do when your world had become as large as unwieldy as Eden's had.

"Lahela," Wren said, but the name was not dripping with condescension as it had been when Mikhail had said it. It sounded affectionate, the same way it did when Enyakatho said Harjo or Wesick. "Your Highness."

She gave Demetri a salute, which was waved away just as quickly by the monarch. "Please don't tell me Wick still finds that funny," he said, looking mildly pained – and yet, Eden thought, it was so obviously in jest, still that tone of levity permeating his words, as though he could never be seen to care too much but he also could not be seen to take himself too seriously. It was a thin line to walk. She knew he could give a speech when he wanted to – she had studied his performances on the Report while she was working with Enyakatho, to get an idea of what they were working towards – but it seemed as though the rebellion had accorded their leader a very narrow character indeed: blithely charming, charismatic when he wanted to be, rousing when he needed to be. She wondered if he had ever found himself asking the General, _what's my motivation_.

She said, "your Majesty," and Wren and Demetri both looked at her. Over their shoulder, she could see that Farid, the other Voice of the Rebellion, was just within sight on the other end of the bridge, waiting near the park gates with a camera mounted on his shoulder. They were clearly headed to film the festival, but for now, they were filming Eden, and so… "Your Majesty," Eden said again, with a slight smile. "Your Highness is for princes, not kings. Sorry."

Wren looked delighted to be informed that Wick had been wrong about something. "You don't say?"

"I do," Eden said, "say."

"Knew you would come in useful at some point," Demetri murmured, and both girls laughed, Selected and rebel.

"It was worth keeping you, Lahela," Wren teased, and then added, looking rather sly, "your _Majesty_, are you not partaking of the festivities?"

"I'm here, aren't I?"

"You're here, but you're lacking colour." Wren tapped her index finger on her lip, a little of the blue spreading onto her nail as she did so, and Demetri smiled.

"I'm surprised you're offering, Wren," he said, at the same time that Eden said, "darling, you're more than welcome to try."

They glanced at each other. Demetri smiled wryly. Eden returned the gesture, almost against her will, the kind of coy smile that one might share with a co-conspirator. Wren rolled her eyes even as the red light on Farid's camera blinked and flashed and suggested that they had been caught in their silent exchange.

"You know," she said, leaning back onto the railing of the bridge. "Enyakatho was complaining earlier that we've had about twelve hours of Selection coverage over the past twelve weeks… and absolutely no romance to be shown for our trouble." She cocked an eyebrow, and Demetri laughed.

Eden said, "you're goading him, Wren."

Wren said, "should I not?"

"Oh," Eden replied. "Please do. It is enormously amusing."

The king rolled his eyes and Wren laughed as she bid them a good festival, and walked off the bridge, towards her waiting companion. The dark green lights of the bridge matched Demetri's eyes nearly perfectly, and made his hair appear a peculiar verdigris colour, like a celebrity from Angeles. He had a strange way of looking at you that made it feel like he could see your bones. "Eden."

"Demetri," she mimicked.

Setting his hand very gently on her waist, in that gentlemanly way that he had, Demetri bowed his head and pressed a kiss into Eden's cheek. It was measured, as all things Demetri did were measured, and yet even so, something leapt in Eden's throat, as one's heart might leap at a particularly deep bass line. Like choreography, she thought, like picking up on a melody by ear, and she knew that Farid would have caught it all.

That was why she was here, she thought. Playing a role, as she always had, as she always was. In the lion's den now, trying to pluck out thorns. The Report was a part of that, if a lesser part of it here than it was in most Selections, but still an integral part. Once Demetri's people began the purge that always followed the vanquishing, once bodies started dropping. _Collaborators will be hanged_, but they couldn't, they wouldn't, hang their queen.

And yet, even as she thought it, she couldn't deny that she didn't mind it all that much. And even as Demetri straightened again, she looked at him, and raised her eyebrow, and was acutely aware that all the people passing them on the bridge were not hiding the fact that they were watching, and acutely aware that Farid's camera was fixed on them, and acutely aware of the fact that Demetri still had his hand on her waist, and that was why she looked at Demetri through her eyelashes and said, "I believe she commented on your lack of colour." She paused. "Your Highness."

Demetri smiled and Eden reached up on her toes to kiss him very gently on the mouth. Her body curved into his almost automatically, as though they had known each other for a thousand days and done this a million times. His hand steadied her, and she could not say what it was about this man that felt so – so – so _solid_, solid and reliable. The kiss was not maladroit, and it was not prolonged – she didn't dare, knowing that she was breaking the rules of the Selection by initiating like this and yet not particularly caring.

When she pulled away, even under the green light, it was apparent that Demetri's mouth was stained orange. His lips curled upwards. "I think we should get Wren to goad me more often," he said.

Eden smiled, and took his arm again.

* * *

The same day that the Layeni festival began, the Selection of Prince Mordred began in earnest. As much as such a term as earnest might be used, for even amongst the courtiers, there remained the whispers that he was doing only that which was required of him to maintain the legacy of his crown. Such a fate was to be pitied, was the general consensus, but it was the burden of he who called himself king. Such was the Selection into which Mordred found himself not only entering, but entering a score of women – not only those who fell within the Crown's jurisdiction, but further those who could claim, one way or another, heritage in the provinces which had been claimed by the rebel Kingdom in Exile.

Most of them, in the interviews that followed their Selection, referred to themselves as refugees. Most of them, in the interviews that followed, referred to the so-called King Demetri as a monster.

Truth be told, Mordred wasn't sure he considered the imposter a monster. Certainly, it was not his brother who wore the crown in exile, was not his brother that spurred all of those orphans under the wheel of war, was not his brother that recurrently flashed up on interrupted Report broadcasts to call Mordred a bastard prince and a liar who had no right to the throne – but.

But.

It was nonetheless a man.

And one could question a hundred times over the morality of a man, or of a man's principles, but there was no denying that one fact. This man breathed, just as Mordred did. His heart beat, no less than once every two seconds. He must eat, and sleep, and bleed. No doubt he had people who loved him, for everyone must. He had people who thought of him during the day, and thought of him in the moments before sleep, and thought of him in the moments before death, just as his General had. In his own moments before sleep, Mordred could not but think of the imposter king's words, in that first broadcast, even while his own foster father died at the foot of Trajan's throne – _I know, as surely as I know my own name, how dearly you all crave peace. _

Liars, the lot of them. Liara, lost among them.

Mordred tried not to think about it too much but he knew, with a certain sort of absoluteness, that he thought of her during the day, and in the moments before sleep, and that he would think of her in the moments before death, if ever his killer allowed him such a moment in which to reflect. Liara Lee had always been the closest thing to a princess the Illéan military had, the daughter of the army's favourite son, but she was the only person that Mordred could consider calling a friend. Not even a particularly close friend – of that class, he named only one. Liara. Friend. She had played with Mordred and Demetri when they were children - any kind of respect or fear that the ordinary person held for their king had been eroded by years of exposure to them in all the awkward aspects of childhood and adolescence. Liara had grown up in the same poisonous environment as Mordred had, had experienced the same thorny vacuum left behind after Demetri's abduction and murder, had been shaped by the same forces that had made Mordred…

Well.

There was no use debating that unduly.

That morning, the Selection began, and the Selected were arranged before him, in ballgowns of rich colours and expensive fabrics. They were beautiful girls, of that he was sure, and any one of them would make a wonderful queen. Here and there, he could spot a face that suggested they were ill at ease in the line-up arraigned by the Queen Regent – a furrowed brow, a set jaw, eyes darting hither-and-thither. For the most part, he thought, reclining in the throne that had been his father's, they looked rather pleased to be there in the first place.

Of course, he thought, to be a Selected was to have a one-in-thirty-five chance of becoming the queen, once all was said and done. Even amongst those in rebel provinces, that must have been seen to be quite the windfall. After all, the rebellion had been fighting this war for some fifteen years, and made almost negligible advances into true Illéa. Mordred had to imagine, even for a girl whose family was vested in deepest exile, those were attractive odds.

Even as the girls looked up at him, they remained under the watchful eye of Mordred's counsellors, who were fanned out in a crescent half-moon shape following the curve of the chamber's northern wall. The Queen Regent had elected, as she always did, to sit among them, shoulder-to-shoulder with Mordred's Minister for Finance and Minister for Education, old men and women with salt and pepper at the temples dressed in neat suits of muted colours. Now, Ysabel leaned forward in her seat, as though it were humanly possible to focus closer on what the next Selected girl had to say as she stepped forward to state her name, caste, and province. If Mordred was telling the whole truth, he had started to block them all out sometime after Dominica. There was only so much irrelevant information one man could be expected to absorb at a given time, he thought.

"Amelia Mwangi. Third Caste. Refugee from occupied Zuni." The last girl was just introducing herself, and Mordred made sure to address her in that same pattern he had adopted for addressing all loyal members of the establishment.

"Thank you, Lady Amelia." The first thing that he had learned when he became the crown prince was that speaking in an official capacity was a simple matter of following the same formula each time, like the simplest of mathematical equations. "Ladies, I thank you all for your applications, for your presence here in the palace, and for your committed dedication to our nation." _Keep ___them___ on your side. _"You have all proven yourselves as most loyal citizens to this kingdom, and most thoughtful friends to our family." _Personalise it._ "Indeed, I feel certain that I shall find my queen from amongst your number. If I fail to do so, surely the deficiency shall fall on my shoulders rather than on your own. There can be no finer Daughters of Illéa than those I glimpse before me." _Sympathise_. "Some of you have been forced to separate from your families. Some of you no longer have families from which to separate." He wasn't sure if he was keeping the boredom from his voice. "I hope you know that the royal family still stands behind our lost Daughters of Illéa, and the families that their disappearances have left bereft." _Reassure ___them___._ "However, our Selection must continue unabated. We must not allow these rebels to infringe upon our ordinary conduct as citizens – and rulers – of Illéa." _Commit_. "I anticipate coming to know each and every one of you in an individual capacity over the coming months. Until then, please, make yourselves at home in the quarters which have been assigned to you."

Mordred waited until the girls had all dipped low into a deep courtesy and begun to retreat through the gold-leaf double doors at the end of the roof before he indicated to his advisors that they were to hold one girl back for further discussion. The co-ordinator, Vandervell, a thin woman in her mid-fifties with unnaturally dark hair, immediately dove into the ranks of the Selected girl to extract the individual that Mordred had identified.

The result was that, when all other girls had filed out of the room, and when Mordred had dismissed his advisors with a careless flick of his hand, his own mother looked particularly concerned at this abrupt change of plans, the cavernous throne room was left empty but for Mordred Dunin and Opal McIntyre.

She was short, a much shorter girl than Mordred had expected, barely above five foot, and squinted a little as though she needed glasses. She had a face shaped like a diamond, but her features were rather soft – prominent cheekbones, plump lips, broad eyes. Her skin and her eyes and her hair were all a rich brown; she had a prominent beauty mark beside her nose. The only way by which the Crown's spy had identified her, Mordred thought, and the strings of his heart stirred slightly in pity for the young woman, for he knew that she had asked to leave the Selection in order to mourn the lover who had been captured in a Crown raid, only to be captured herself in the raid that had followed. She would represent Hansport in the Crown Selection that was to follow. Mordred had no doubt that Vivian Lahela would already have recounted the coup in that evening's Axiom – _Selected in Exile Comes to Her Senses_.

Nonetheless, he waited for Ysabel to shut the door to the throne room behind her, and waited to hear the lock _click_, and waited for Opal McIntyre to turn those rich brown eyes upon the throne with some degree of trepidation within before he spoke, his voice a little lower than it had been while he addressed the whole group. "I did promise I would get you back. The lost Daughters of Illéa."

"Congratulations," she said, and then, a moment later, "thank you. I suppose."

"You're very welcome," he replied. "I suppose."

She would have been warned, he supposed, to watch her words and to watch her conduct, lest her punishment be meted out on the man in the palace's oubliette, beneath the castle, in chains within the prison. Mordred couldn't find it in his heart to be too sympathetic. She had turned to the rebellion of her own volition. She had betrayed the crown, and sworn fealty to a liar. If she was kept in line by the fear of what might happen to one dear to her heart, well. She was just that much closer to mirroring Mordred himself.

She was clearly expecting an interrogation, as Mordred stood from the throne and descended slowly down the steps, pausing a few steps from the base. She had a decent poker face, he thought, and a clear determination not to be gotten the better of. And so, with an exhale, he sank down to sit on the step and said, "I promise we aren't going to kill you."

"You'll forgive me," Opal said stiffly. "If your promise doesn't mean much."

"I forgive you," he replied. "Did they treat you well?" It was the question he had been waiting to ask, all of these long days and weeks and months, ever since he had found the note on his bed and found General Lee's face quite so hollow. _Are they treating you well? _He wasn't even sure anymore what he would consider _well_. At this point, he would accept the bare minimum. Accept, but not condone, he thought grimly, for the day was coming when everyone involved in this horrific, bastardised Selection would face that fate which was due to them. "Were they kind to you? I assure you, whatever you say shall remain between the two of us."

That seemed to take her aback. He didn't think she had been expecting a question like that, nor so genuinely delivered. And he had asked it quite genuinely. She had no physical signs of injury, but for that sustained in the raid that had brought her back to Angeles – the slightest graze on her temple, a bruise on her knuckles where she had tried to punch one of Set's deputies as they bordered the van. Mordred respected her for as much.

"Very well," Opal replied, rather archly. "They treated us like queens."

Mordred's lip curled. "As they ought." He was playing the game. He couldn't trust that they weren't playing the same game in the Kingdom in Exile. He couldn't even trust that they were playing by the same rules – not after what had happened.

Mordred remembered the General as well. That was the part that all others seemed to forget. Just as his older brother had trusted the old man as a kind of uncle, as a Set to Set's own Set, so too had Mordred been raised at the foot of the old man who had become, in the Crown's own words, the very first traitor of Illéa. The man who had stolen Mordred's own brother from him. The man who had caused Demetri's death in so direct a manner as to constitute murder.

Mordred had slit this man's throat with his own hands before he had even achieved his twenty-first birthday. Sometimes, when he woke abruptly from sleep, he could still feel the blood on his hands.

* * *

_None of the women here want to marry you. They want to marry the ___king___. They want to marry Demetri Dunin._

For some reason, Vardi Tayna's voice came to him at the very worst moments. Demetri couldn't name what self-destructive part of himself was responsible for that particular defect, but it was a persistent part, that reared its head at the worst possible moments – like when he sent another letter to Yue Yukimura and wondered if she would like him less when she understood him better, or when he caught the way that Saran Altai watched Wick when she thought he wasn't looking or right now, when he washed the colour from his mouth. He wasn't sure why the worst parts of him spoke with Vardi Tayna's voice, but the answer could not be a good one.

_They want to marry the__ heir to Illéa. They want to marry the crown. They couldn't give a shit about you, __d__emusha._

God, Vardi Tayna was a moron sometimes, but sometimes she had her finger exactly on the pulse. And speaking of the devil herself, here she came now, down the hill towards the woollen mills. She was wearing the apricot sweater she had been wearing when the rebels had liberated Clermont. She had been hit by debris, he remembered, and in his mind rose the image of Tayna with her head bleeding and one eye nearly swollen shut, her sclera stained near-black with pooled blood, impatiently pulling off her sweater to avoid getting it stained. It was important for one's own dignity to keep a few nice things, the General had always told them. It had been part of the reason he had always polished his boots, even on their longest escapes through the Wasteland, when it was inevitable that they would be scuffed and dirtied within thirty seconds of touching the ground again. _Dignity_, he had always told them, and Vardi Tayna had always said, _what good is dignity if you're dead_?

But she had always heeded him. She had always kept that sweater clean. The General had stolen it from a Labrador department store for her fifteenth birthday. Demetri was not surprised to see her wearing it now.

Vardi Tayna walked over to Täj, and he put his arm around her. It was so automatic that he did not even break off his conversation with Atiena as he did so, and Vardi Tayna barely seemed to notice the weight on her shoulders as she accepted a tumbler of whiskey from Wick and said something dirty-minded to him about the mix of purple and ochre and amber on his mouth. It was like they had simply gravitated near one another, like they just preferred to be beside each other when there was no compelling reason to be otherwise. Tonight of all nights, Demetri could not say why that simple gesture irritated him so much, and so he tried to quell it as quickly as it arose. They were his comrades – they were his friends – they were his family.

And yet.

They were smoking _metzliaxitia__,_ he could tell that much from sixty feet away, and made no effort to hide it as he approached. Atiena appeared braver for their date – or audition – together four days ago, and gave him a wave as he approached. With her __ai-katean __disassembled and the blossoms scattered throughout her hair, through which lamplight filtered like a halo, she looked more ethereal than Demetri had ever thought the warrior woman from Tammins could ever look. There were more than a few soldiers looking at her admiringly, he noted, and could not entirely blame them.

"You're all being very insular," he said, and heard the General's voice in his as he did so, for this was precisely his usual accusation during the festival when he would find the inner circle camping out by the river with drinks and a determination to avoid the revelries. Here, however, there were a few soldiers on guard duty studiously pretending not to have had anything to drink – he would have to speak to Uzokuwa about that, he thought – and two of the Selected, Atiena and Elizabeth, and two of the inner circle, Täj and Wick, and there was Uzokuwa himself, which was almost enough to make Demetri laugh. Three of the Selected, he reminded himself, because Vardi Tayna was looking at him, silver lips almost as bright as her eyes were dark, as he said, "you're being rude."

"Yes," Wick said, "yes, we are – drink?"

"Don't mind if I do."

He took a seat next to Elizabeth Tucker, and tried to avoid thinking of Givre's instructions as he did so. Wick handed him a glass of amber liquid, and then one of the silver bowls filled with barva berries, which Demetri waved away. Wick settled back on his heels and said, "no colour?"

"No colour," Demetri confirmed. "You're wearing enough for all of us."

Wick grinned, streaks of amber barva on his teeth. "It's a festival, Dimi. Life is for living."

Elizabeth Tucker seemed to be hiding a green-lipped grin at that. Demetri thought it likely it was the Dimi that had produced such a reaction. The guards had created a little stone hearth to keep themselves warm during their shift, and the light from the dancing fire seemed to paint her hair an even deeper, richer scarlet, like her hair itself was aflame.

"Are all those girls going to be expecting chains from you by the end of the night?" Demetri enquired, feigning curiosity, and Wick rolled his eyes and flicked a berry at him. It struck Demetri just above the eyebrow, leaving a tiny starburst mark of umber, and Demetri laughed. "You could just say yes, you know."

He glanced at his watch. The fireworks would be starting in forty minutes or so. He wasn't sure he wanted to see how drunk Wick would get after that, or how much havoc he might wreak. Layeni was such a lovely little town, Demetri thought, it was almost a shame the rebels occasionally had to arrive.

"Somewhere to be, your Majesty?"

Elizabeth Tucker seemed a little braver than most, Demetri thought, and he thought she probably had right to be. Her father had participated in the Pongotown massacre under Lord Set's command, and had drank himself to death shortly afterwards; her mother had been put to death at Queen Ysabel's orders for providing medical aid to rebels given refuge on the Tucker family farm. Both sides of the war, Demetri thought, same bloody, tragic result. Looking at Elizabeth Tucker, at her pale heart-shaped face and her long red hair, you would never suspect it, unless you saw the way she held her jaw, or the way her eyes caught you like a net.

"If only I could say nowhere, Lady Elizabeth," was Demetri's reply, and she raised an eyebrow as he flicked his sleeve back over his watch – an eighteenth birthday present from Raphael, who had met Agares for the first time in going to buy it – and met her gaze with a blithe smile. "Are you enjoying the festival?"

She paused. "Now I am."

Shit. Wyatt. Demetri had let it slip his mind. What had they been thinking, moving the girl with the recently dead fiancé to Layeni right before the festival devoted to romance? "I'm sorry," he said, and dropped his voice low, so that Wick, who was saying something to Uzokuwa about Wicks outnumbering Demetris at the orphanage, could not hear him. "That was… enormously tactless."

Elizabeth Tucker smiled. She really was a very pretty girl. "I appreciate the apology."

"Anytime," Demetri said wryly, hoping to make her laugh, and she did – she looked down as she did so, but that was still something. "Are you cold?"

She was holding a cup of barva wine between her hands like she was hoping that it would warm her as a cup of tea might, and Demetri abruptly realised that she was probably cold, despite the weak fire that Uzokuwa's men had produced. With the sun sunk and gone behind the clocktower, the chill had crept in quickly, and almost unnoticed. The rebels and Vardi Tayna were wearing warmer clothes and Atiena – well, Demetri wouldn't have been surprised if Atiena Morris could just decide not to be cold, and to make it so. He considered telling Wick to hand over his jacket, partly just to get back at the propagandist for all of this your highness nonsense.

"No," she lied, and then, glancing at Demetri briefly, back-pedalled. "Maybe."

He chuckled, and thinking again of the liberation of Clermont, pulled off his sweater to offer to her – "I'm sorry," he said, "I didn't think to wear a jacket – something about making me seem softer, more relatable?" – and she accepted it with a cautious half-smile. This was what the rebellion was about, Demetri thought ruefully, moving from trying to keep blood off your few belongings to trying to keep those around you warm. Vardi Tayna had seen what he was doing, and doing a bad job of hiding her smile.

"Don't apologise," Elizabeth Tucker said.

"I did say anytime," he replied simply, and she gave that same half-smile again.

"Well," she said, "I did say I appreciated it."

She pulled it on, and managed to make it look almost chic, pulling the sleeves over her hand, the hem falling to mid-thigh so that only a tiny strip of fabric remained visible beneath the jumper. Demetri hadn't paid attention to what she was wearing until that moment, but he recognised Raphael's taste in fashion now as he saw the pale floral design. It was sweeter than he could say, he thought, that even despite her obvious resentment for the rebellion that she had gone out of her way to clothe not only those Selected in her care, but the newly arrived girl from the bunker.

Every so often, Demetri was reminded anew why it was important to fight this fight.

Uzokuwa and his men were trying to start a song, to Täj's stubbornly silent amusement, and Demetri watched Vardi Tayna almost sleepily turn her head into the pale man's shoulder with a casual ease that suggested they had been constructed at the same time specifically to fit together. Demetri thought again, _none of the women here want to marry you. They want to marry the king. They want to marry Demetri Dunin._

The only thing he could use to repel such words were the General's last words, spoken over his very last words, broadcast even as the bastard prince Mordred had butchered Klahan in the name of law._ W__hat wrong I have done, I have done in the name of my nation, which is as dear to me as my own liver._ The General had always been a stoic, but in those brief moments of vulnerability that he had permitted Demetri to glimpse, it had been apparent just how dear he had held the whole nation of Illéa to his own poor broken heart._ Your kingdom has been denied to you by means of deceit; your king has been denied to you by means of arsenic. In a hundred years, maybe you will call us heroes. Some of us, perhaps, martyrs._

He said, "I don't suppose you know this one?" to Elizabeth Tucker, as Uzokuwa started off the song with a roar from somewhere very deep in his chest _– _**__I left my girl in An-ge-les! __**And the reply from the rebels, similarly shouted rather than sang – __how cruel, how cruel, how cruel! __

"I don't," Elizabeth Tucker said ruefully, and sipped at her wine again. A tiny trickle of green had escaped one corner of her lips, to trickle towards her chin. "They weren't exactly on the radio in Midston."**__ Enqaben' yase An-ge-les!__** The singer's girl was in the castle at Angeles, Demetri thought, and wondered for the thousandth time who had written this song, and why you never heard what happened to the girl at the end of it all. Wick was beating out a rudimentary beat on his makeshift seat, but this was a marching song, and it needed no true rhythm other than one's heart.

"Trust me," Demetri said, "you are missing absolutely nothing." These were the kinds that Uzokuwa preferred, sounding like they should be roared across a battlefield right before the clash, and he could see why you might prefer it when it came to drinking, but he had personally always preferred the laments – the ones that you would sing the night before the clash, to bid goodbye to those you might never say again, to say how dear the hope was to your heart that you might meet again someday at that same fire to sing the same songs. __Poor girl, poor girl, poor girl!__

"Oh," Elizabeth Tucker said, "I think you're being harsh." **__So let's return to An-ge-les! __**Uzokuwa had a voice powerful enough to reverberate in your ribs when you heard it. "Although..." She tilted her head as she conceded the point. "Might not be suitable for tonight, I suppose. I'll refrain from judgement until the song is over. Could go badly for this couple. I can't imagine many rebel songs have happy endings." __Let's go! Let's go! Let's go!__

That made him think of Yue, and that made him smile. "Horrifically few, I'm afraid," he agreed, "and even if they did, I think Uzokuwa would refuse to sing them on principle." The final call, one for blood – **_k__i a pa ọba _**_**t'An-ge-les**_! Without speaking the languages of the Federation, Demetri could translate the verse automatically: _and kill the king of Angeles_. And the reply – __gu-ul, gu-ul, gu-ul!__ Victory, victory, victory.

"I don't think," he said, thoughtfully. "That I've ever heard one end happily."

"Makes them realistic," Elizabeth Tucker said. "Don't you think?"

* * *

She did not tilt her head. She did not lean in. She left the bridge rather wondering if she should have. She left the bridge rather wondering if she would get the chance again. She left the bridge rather wondering if she should be wondering these things.

Liara Lee was beginning to suspect there was something in those berries.

Täj had been called away by one of the rebels, one of the small lads in black that had been assigned to guard the festival, and Liara had gone back into the square to look for the other girls. She had not found them, but she had spotted Raphael and Agares, sitting on the balcony of one of the houses which overlooked the clock tower, and been waved up to join them, the Smetiskos' friends rather cooing over the Selected girl like she was an exotic animal. They were all the kinds of people Liara would have once thought of as provincial, and yet time in Layeni had made her rather appreciative of them – of the slightly guttural accent of the wastes, of their rather insistent way of providing drink as she settled herself into the half-broken wicker chair nearest the railing, of the way that every spare bit of space was occupied by an overgrowing plant or a rusting bicycle or nets to be repaired. Raphael refilled her cup, and they drank, and Liara abruptly realised that now would be the perfect time to give Raphael the gift that she and Yue and Atiena had got for her to say thank you, if only the lovely dress Agares had made her had _pockets_.

Instead, Liara said, "Raphael, we never thanked you properly for what you did for us. For taking us in. I know you'll just say that Demetri asked you and you were happy to help, but... it's more than that. You and Agares have been wonderful to us. All of us."

Raphael laughed. "Honestly, Liara, I grew up with seven siblings. Having you all in the house... it's a comfort, truly, it is. A touch of familiarity. Agares and I want to have a big family someday, but... you know. After the war is over. I think we were hoping you Selected would be good practice for teenagers, but there's been remarkably little drama. Disappointingly little."

Liara had to agree. In all of the stories of Selections she had heard before, there had always been some catty element, some behind-the-scenes bitching, some competitiveness. In this strange rebel Selection, she knew jealousies rose and tempers were tested, but, watching the other girls dancing in the square down below, she could honestly believe that each wanted a happy ending for the others, whatever shape that might take. "I apologise there wasn't more scandal," she said, and Raphael laughed again. "Seven siblings, though?" She wasn't sure she could imagine it. She had been raised an only child and, after Demetri's disappearance, so had Mordred; their homes had always felt slightly empty, palatial as they were with so few to inhabit the enormous rooms. As a child, Liara had always wanted a sister, maybe even two, but seven? "That's... impressive."

"Six sisters, and one very outnumbered little brother: Uriel, Samael, Michael, Eremiel, Zadkiel, Kafziel, Gabriel..." Raphael shook her head and smiled sadly. Her eyes appeared to be focused on something, or somewhere, very far away and out of reach. It was the same look that Liz had worn, looking at the proposal. It was the same look Ysabel had worn, looking at Demetri's portrait. Liara wondered if she ever had that expression in her eyes, without realising. There was something awful, visceral, gut-wrenching about it. "They've all left me now, of course."

"Left...?" Sudden realisation. "Oh." A whole family wiped out. She thought of the family photo she had seen in the kitchen, all the tall blonde girls and the little boy with the deep green eyes. Liara had to wonder if maybe that was the unspoken reason that Raphael had left the rebellion, had left the fighting to people like Wick and Täj and Thiago, people with less to lose when the earth was ripped out from underneath them. "I'm so sorry to hear that."

"Such is the rebellion." Raphael glanced at Liara. "You understand how it must be. You left your family. Those you loved."

Liara twisted her hands together, beneath the table. She had indeed, and missed them little, if truth be told. She knew her mother would worry – Naomi would not have it in her to be as wrathful as the commander usually was – but that she would have denounced her daughter a hundred times over by now, a thousand times if they had let her. Her father would be refuting the salacious allegations that he had ever had a daughter. Such was the way of the court in Angeles.

Even the people you cared for the most were apparently capable of ordering you murdered.

"Yes," she agreed, softly. "Those I loved."

She put it in the past tense, just in case Raphael's suspicions would be aroused, and the lie settled in the pit of her stomach like she had swallowed a rock. The woman had been kinder to her than Liara had any right to expect her to be, but she was still a rebel, still a citizen of the Kingdom in Exile. There was no point in arousing suspicion when you could avoid doing so. Raphael's eyes still sharpened any time Liara mentioned sending a letter home – she imagined she would have been picked up on any mention of _love_, present tense, and maybe Liara had been away from Angeles too long, for the decision rankled but she was able to move on from it smoothly again.

"Such," she said, "is the rebellion."

Raphael said, "I'll drink to that." Her lips were a bright red, an incredible scarlet, the same colour as Agares'. Raphael and Liara touched their cups to one another, and Raphael said, "I heard a rumour our king was skulking about these parts. I don't suppose you've seen him?"

Liara blinked. Demetri was here? "No… no, I haven't."

Raphael nodded quietly and set down her drink. Agares said, almost worriedly, "I thought I saw you talking to him?"

"Oh," Liara said, "no, I was just… that was Täj."

She didn't like the way the smile that followed from both women seemed knowing. But instead of accusing her, or making any jokes, Raphael just said, quite thoughtfully, "what a strange, odious fucker that boy is" and Agares nearly choked on her drink.

"_Rafa_."

"I say it from a place of love," Raphael added, with a laugh. "God help me, what that little liar sees in him, I will _never _know."

"Love is not logical," her wife said, a soft reminder, and Raphael responded with a brilliant smile towards the woman she loved, her whole face utterly transformed by the expression, so openly and unconcernedly infatuated that Liara felt like she was intruding on a private moment just by witnessing it. "If it was, why would I still be with you?

"_A__llah 'aelam_," Raphael replied wryly. "God knows."

Liara bit back the question that rose, knowing that it would not look good – that it would betray some side of her she did not want to even admit existed, some feeling buried deep down that she could not risking exposing to the light of the day. Instead, she said, "you've known Tayna a very long time?"

Raphael nodded. "I guarded her when she first came in." On seeing Liara's expression, she continued – "that girl's never spent longer than ten seconds out of a viper's nest. The General called it protective custody. She was running from something she would have run back towards, given enough time and enough doubt." She took a sip of her drink, creating little gold lines zig-zagging across the red of her mouth.

_Running from something she would have run back towards, given enough time…_ Liara hated to admit that she could relate, at least a little. She picked her tone carefully with her next words. "Sort of seems the easy choice," she said, as casually as she could manage, examining the cup in front of her. You are a Selected, she reminded herself. These were the natural sort of questions to ask. Sussing out the competition. "For the Selection. She was Klahan's protegee, right? And she's known Demetri all these years..."

Raphael nodded. "Right." She reached forward and tapped the table, a gesture Liara had come to understand was Wasteland shorthand for _I shouldn't be saying this_. "But don't forget. So have you."

Knowing someone in childhood, Liara thought, the kind of blessed childhood accorded to those in the palace, free of burden and stress and worry, and knowing someone in adolescence, the kind of adolescence where you were expected to provide blood and marrow to form the foundations of a new nation… those were two very different types of _knowing_. "I don't think it's quite the same thing."

Raphael was sympathetic. "I know you won't believe me." She tilted her head and looked at Liara, and somehow Liara could tell that the older woman was telling her the entire truth. "But you have the same chance as any other girl here. Maybe even more." That was very hard to believe, Liara thought, when Demetri had accorded her fifteen minutes in the first few days and studiously avoided her ever since.

"I'm pretty sure," Liara said, "that they're just keeping me around to embarrass the Crown. That's not why I came here."

Agares said, without any malice in her voice, "why did you come here, then?"

Liara thought of the letter from Mordred, sewn into the lining of her coat, back at the safe house, the letter he had given her all those months ago on the rooftop of the palace when he had asked her not to leave, and yet she had known that she could not stay. She thought of the note she had left him, on his pillow, like a coward who could not face the reality of what she was doing: _I'll find you the truth. _She thought of her father, returning home night after night, to say that another thirty-odd lives had been lost on the front-lines, and all because the rebels had managed to find a princely look-alike. She thought of the way Täj's pale green eyes had of looking straight through her, and she thought of the first time she had seen Demetri in fifteen years and all the injuries that had marred the face she had wondered about for years on years, and she thought of her Demetri, as she had known him, little and serious and sweet-natured.

"Love," Liara said. "Is not logical."

* * *

Of all the members of Corvina Rouen's family, of all the members of the Pandora crime family to escape, the only one who had managed to hide from Thiago Wesick's apparently all-encompassing grip was Viridia Cox, who had barricaded herself into a brothel near the border with Fennley and readied herself and the girls within for a war, if it came to a war. After all, from Vida's point of view, Demetri's spymaster had come for her lover, for her comrades, for the only girls Vida had considered daughters. Goddammit, she had _warned _Cor against this whole Selection business – and look what had happened! Knox, taken; Kanon, vanished; Khione, beaten within an inch of her light and disappeared away with the rebels. And all others, scattered to the wind. Vida wanted to have faith in that old maxim, _honour among thieves_, but she wasn't sure, in this new landscape, that she could. No thief would choose honour when the alternative was a profit, she thought, and, besides, once Thiago Wesick had taken her legs out from under her, Cor was no longer Corvina Rouen, scion of a criminal network, but simply Cor the Selected out of favour, Cor the girl, Cor who had lost.

That made people scatter. That made people lose faith. That made people lose hope.

And where people had lost hope, the remnants of the Gildas association would come preying.

And so Vida boarded up the brothel.

It simply didn't bear thinking about.

A lot of girls in Pandora's brothels had been in a Gildas house before that. They all emerged the same way, if they ever emerged again - branded with the sigil, **Ꮬ**, and usually worse for the wear, with hollow eyes. A girl who came out with only a few scars, enough to still be considered pretty, was counted lucky. Girls emerged from the Gildas houses with missing eyes, with flesh gouged from their limbs, with fingers lost. And they were, all too often, mere girls. It made Vida's stomach roil to see them. It made her blood boil when they asked her for work, simply because they knew little else.

She always tried to turn them away. Sometimes Cor asked them to do other work – to be thieves, to carry information from here to there, to smuggle things across the border. And yet, Vida always saw in their eyes the traces of the horrors-that-had-been and the horrors-that-would-be-again.

So, when Artur Gildas came knocking at the brothel late in the evening, Vida felt very well justified indeed in firing a revolver through the door, and hoping against hope that she had hit something vital.

Of course, she had not. She was half-convinced that Gildas had signed some unholy pact with Satan himself to live this long in the life that he had lived. He was taller than Vida had expected him to be, narrow and dark-haired, with dark eyes and very sharp features. He was maybe ten or twenty years older than Vida herself, middle-aged and yet still comprised of all sharps and hollows, like a man that had been created from photo negatives and extrapolated therefrom.

He had said to her, when she came to the door, "have they sent her head to you yet?"

And Vida had replied, with all the ferocity of which she was capable, "whose head?"

Zenith had spoken of going against the rebellion, of trying to strike directly against Demetri, but Vida had always held him back. They were a rebellion within a rebellion, so to speak, that much was true, and yet – if they had Corvina, she had reminded him, and if Corvina was alive, then any action against Demetri amounted to an action directly against Cor's own safety. They had not yet been delivered her head, but that didn't mean they never would be.

So Vida said, "whose head?"

"Whose head? Haven't you a leader?"

"Me."

"Oh," Artur Gildas said, "well, then, you are fucked," and he pronounced each word as though it was its own phrase, like Well Then You Are Fucked.

"And if we aren't?" Vida had been chambering a second round in the revolver even as she spoke.

Artur Gildas had said, "Thiago Wesick was kind to you when he visited. The devastation could have been so much worse."

"Yes," Vida had said, "we feel enormously fortunate." The girls in the brothel had bristled to hear that she was even speaking to the man, was even entertaining the prospect of civil conversation with him. She had been, for a very brief moment, concerned that her revolver was partially for her own protection as well as the protection of her girls.

Gildas had said, "I just came by to see how bad the devastation was. To see how desperate Pandora was."

Vida had replied, "and have you seen?"

And Gildas had said, "oh, I have seen plenty."

* * *

Earlier in that night, when they were watching one of the contests in the square, Yue had asked Saran, quite without knowing why, "do you think it's obvious when you're in love?" She had said it after watching one of the Layeni townspeople put her arms around her husband, and watching the way the man looked down at his wife with an expression that somehow made it seem like he might be seeing her for the first time.

Saran had said, "I imagine it must be." She had smiled. "I can't say I'm an expert on the topic." Of course, Yue thought, that was true. For all Saran's emotional attunedness, her romantic history was as attenuated as Yue's own. She wasn't sure if that was the New Asian part of the equation, or maybe just some legacy of the north. "Tayna? Maybe you don't have a heart because someone stole it."

Vardi Tayna had said, "it's slow."

Yue had said, "something you have to realise?"

"I guess." She had reclined where she sat, perched on one of the wrought-iron tables scattered about the square. "Something about waking up with someone else and seeing them look like shit and not really caring." Vardi Tayna shrugged. "So I've been told."

Yue had thought, as she often thought, how strange it must be to fall in love twice over. She had always held such a refined sense of romance in her mind – of getting to know another person as well as she knew herself, of loving someone with the deep intensity that she read of in the old classics, of having that elemental companionship that she glimpsed in Raphael and Agares' relationship. Could a person do that twice? Where would you find the energy, the time, the space in your heart to do it again? How could you recover from the first time?

Maybe that sort of love didn't exist. She thought that, and then looked out on the square, and then dismissed that thought again. She could see that, or something like it, right here and now. Not like her own parents, who had engaged in a passionate and short-term affair that had ended, quite unfortunately for all involved, in an unplanned pregnancy and an unplanned child and an unplanned marriage, two incompatible people tied together for life by their own short-sightedness and their own ambition. Nothing like her own parents, Yue thought grimly, but truth be told she had seen very little in Layeni to remind her of her parents. Things seemed a little more elemental here.

Yue had thought, as she often thought, that whenever she was removed from the Selection, she could maybe find some kind of a life here. That image – of living in one of the little apartments sharing a cobbled courtyard with four or five other households, of walking to the bakery in the morning to buy just enough new warm bread for the day, of finding some simple job here which would allow her to buy her books and her painting supplies, of hewing out some small slice of the world that could be hers, just hers.

And then, she thought, there would be all the time in the world to _realise_, if there was something to realise, if she could find something that she wanted to realise.

That was nice. That was a nice image, and she held it within her, almost like a spark that might warm her, as the other girls went to dance – Saran taking charge of Eden, as she had taken charge of Liz, to ensure that she was not left adrift among the girls of Layeni who had been given the chance to forge tenuous friendships in the long weeks of the Selection without selections being made, and Atiena coaxing Täj out onto the cobbles without much success at all, and Vardi Tayna stretched out her arms and her legs and had said, to Yue, once they were by themselves, quite quietly, "oh. Demetri's by the river."

Yue had blinked at her in surprise. "He is?"

Vardi Tayna nodded. "By the Martyr's Needle." And then, clearly realising that Yue's thought processes had seized up slightly with the mention of the king, said, quite knowingly, "I think he's a bit lonely."

The spy had jumped down from the table and crossed the square to… well, Yue wasn't really sure what that girl got up to when she abruptly disappeared from a conversation. Maybe she didn't do anything, Yue thought ruefully, maybe it was a concentrated effort to seem mysterious.

Or maybe she could only put up with being around Yue for so long. That was also, she thought, slightly mournfully, a very realistic option.

And then, because they were at a lover's festival, and this seemed like something that lovers did, and because she didn't know when she would get a chance, she went down by the river. She knew the Martyr's Needle from spending time with Saran and the children from the orphanage – it was not quite as slender as its name suggested, but it was a stone pillar placed in the centre of the river to measure its height during the flooding season, marked off in sections of old Wasteland measurements that Yue had never heard of and had no frame of reference for: three _çev_, eight _eka_, eleven _kau_. She had no idea how you could expect to measure anything with such units. No wonder everything in Layeni seemed the slightest bit off-kilter, minutely crooked, just enough to feel lived in.

And sure enough, there he was. Contrary to Vardi Tayna's assertion, he did not look lonely. Yue thought Demetri was very good at seeming comfortable in scenarios where no one else would be. Here, he just looked peaceful, the light of the festival glowing in the distance like a fire on the horizon but here, out here, just the quiet of the night. He looked more casual than she had expected him to. She hadn't ever expected to see the king in a t-shirt, but here he was. He didn't even look cold.

"Would I be interrupting?"

He turned his eyes on her, and there was a warmth in his eyes that suggested he was genuinely at least a little bit happy to see her. He was sitting on the little stone stage that Yue still had no name for, the one that jutted a few feet out into the canal to make loading and unloading boats a little easier, one foot skimming the surface of the ice. "I was actually hoping to see you."

That was another warmth, like the idea of a peaceful life in Layeni. Yue moved slightly closer, to him, moving not hesitantly but gently, because it was all so quiet and she did not want to shatter this moment. "VT wasn't very subtle."

"She never is."

He held his hand out to her, and she took it as she lowered herself down to sit next to him. That was strange, she thought, strange to find him three-dimensionally and real and existing beyond the page, though of course she had never mistaken him for anything else.

Demetri said, "did she tell you where I was?"

"She did."

"That's very sweet." He paused. "I think I was at risk of being melancholy. It's a good thing you're here."

"Happy to help," Yue said softly, and Demetri smiled. They had twined the Needle with little plastic lights shaped like butterflies, pale pinks and purples. Her mother would have called it tacky, but Yue had found she rather loved the way that Layeni people chose to decorate as they wanted, to celebrate the things they cared about with what they had. It was nice, and strange, to see Demetri doused in such soft lights.

She wasn't really sure how she was meant to speak to him in person. Using her tongue rather than her pen seemed somehow unwieldy, knowing that you let some unconsidered word out, could say something thoughtless or uncool and be utterly unable to take it back again, not the way you could slash a poorly considered word out on a page.

So, for a long moment, she didn't say anything, and neither did he. She could hear, very far away, the sound of the festival's revelries continuing, and indeed it sounded as though it was beginning to pick up a notch in anticipation of the fireworks to come – there was a brass band starting up in the square, and there were whoops and calls at some competition ongoing near the thirteenth bridge, and the general haze of laughter and chatter from the crowds. And it did sound very far away – they were sort of shielded here from the rest of the world, divorced from the rest of the festival ongoing, and adrift from the rest.

The light played across the frozen river as though exposing hidden arteries of sapphire and silver within, showing up like veins under pale skin. There was something strangely peaceful about a world that had been arrested into place like this – the water locked into rigid being, the bare bones of the skeletal trees totally unmoving, the air still and cold. Raphael had Yue a_ yukata_ of cotton because it was too expensive to find the silk for a_ kimono_, but it really wasn't the season for it, Yue mused, and felt almost guilty for thinking so critically about a gift.

The river looked solid, Yue thought, and there was something strange about that, after a lifetime spent on the ice – carefully curated in a rink, leavened over and again by resurfacers, surrounded by concrete and steel rails – to see a canal like this. Like seeing a tiger out of its cage, she thought ruefully.

Demetri had glanced at her, and very obviously paused and very obviously focused and broke the silence almost reluctantly, as though he had been enjoying the silence as much as she had, but had something he wanted to get out. He spoke slightly hesitantly, and Yue thought she had never heard him sound hesitant before. "_K__onban Yue-chan ka…_ no, _wa, wa totemo kirei_..._ kireidesu_. Did I say that right?"

"It was pretty close," she said, "it was pretty perfect," and thought of Vardi Tayna's words when she saw Demetri smile again. _Something about waking up with someone else and seeing them look incredibly messy and not really caring. _Did Demetri ever look messy? The idea of wanting to find the answer to that seemed somehow…. salacious.

"I've never been very good with languages," he said ruefully, and Yue thought of the little characters at the end of the letters he sent her, drawn out carefully, not exactly perfect and a little crooked, but mostly right. "Though I've always wanted to learn."

Yue couldn't imagine he had much spare time for such things when he was trying to set up a country. "Well," she said, "I can see that phrase coming in handy for diplomacy."

He laughed. "Any other suggestions?"

"I'm _absolutely_ drawing a blank." She scuffed her shoe along the ice.

"Did I put you on the spot?"

"Yes." She smiled. "I'll let you know if I think of anything."

"If your suggestions are like your literary opinions," Demetri said thoughtfully, "I don't think I want to know."

Yue said, "you're wrong about Jegina's ending. You won't change my mind about that."

"Give me another few tries," Demetri said, and then he put his head on her shoulder, such a simple motion, and he made it seem so natural and so comfortable even as Yue felt her breath catch slightly and worry that he could hear or feel the slight leap of her heart as he did so. He yawned, and Yue wondered how long it had been since he slept. His hair was all streaked with pastel light from the Needle. "Are you enjoying _the Master and Margarita_?"

"It's not the kind of book I usually read," she said, "it's satire, right?"

"I think Bulgakov was trying to make a point about atheism." He shut his eyes. "Have you got to the ending yet?"

"Not yet. Should I be looking forward to it?"

"It's a nice ending," he said, "I promise you that much. Even if it takes a while to get there."

"_And then they lived happily ever after?_"

"Yeah," Demetri said softly, "something like that."

* * *

At first glance, "if I am dead, I have been killed", meant very little to the person reading it. After all, anyone was capable of making doomsday predictions about their own fate.

However, when the person who sent that letter was Lissa Dove, and when Lissa Dove was announced missing, and when Lissa Dove could not be found, well...

Ekaitza Jones started to pay a little more attention.

If was an if, she told herself, and Atsegina, if Atsegina was inclined to listen. Usually, Atsegina was not inclined to listen - not with so many patients to attend to in the morning - and so Ekaitza was left to think to herself that _if _was an _if _until it was an _if _no longer.

And when Lissa Dove was declared missing, that _if _began to resemble an _if _slightly less.


	24. Fixed On Your Hand Of Gold

****Chapter 23: Fixed on Your Hand of Gold****

* * *

__With a roar, my heart rose to its feet, like ashes of ash, settle soft and as pure as snow.__  
With each love I cut loose, I was never the same. _I fell in love with the fire long ago. _

\- Andrew Byrne-Hozier

* * *

The fireworks shattered the world into fragments and the sky seemed to splinter into vibrant colours. With a scream and a whistle, the first sixteen rockets arced into the air and exploded into reds and greens, showing up the clouds in their grey silhouettes as lightning would. For a single second, the stars were utterly obscured by the explosion of brightness. And she said, "we could leave."

That was always her answer, and some small part of him wanted to hate her for it.

"No, we couldn't. We couldn't do that to him." He paused. That wasn't true. Vardi Tayna had done it a dozen times over. She had cut and run more times than he could count. It was like some part of her refused to acknowledge that she could share the air with another. "I couldn't."

She had always come back. For a long time, Täj hadn't been sure who she was coming back for.

"It's as easy as one foot in front of the other, __demusha__."

"Where would you go?" In the old days, when the Wastelands were still wild, she could disappear like steam into smoke. Nowadays, the Kingdom begin to settle and put down roots, it would be so much harder to vanish. The Crown may not have any pictures of her, but the little dark-haired spy was in competition for the hand of a king. She could not slip into the shadows so easily anymore.

"That," Tayna said, "is a question for __after__."

He knew that Demetri was afraid of precisely this, that with the General gone and Demetri growing into his kingship and all she knew slipping from her, she would be left without any tethers to the rebellion, any reason at all to fight. It was why the General had always compared her to a feral dog - without someone on the other end of the chain, there was no telling which way she might go when she decided to maul. It wasn't as though they couldn't fight without her, but a Kingdom without Vardi Tayna - Täj wasn't sure it was a kingdom he would want any part in.

"Even if I asked you to stay?"

She said, rather sadly, "would you?"

He paused.

Vardi Tayna said, gazing at the stars like she had lost some piece of herself, strewn among them, "we're soulmates, remember? Welded together, artery to vein, sinew to ligament. Me being in the Selection didn't change that. You fucking some other girl definitely won't."

"Don't say it like that." Every so often, she reminded him what kind of a person she was, that she had tried to kill him thrice over, that she was still half-feral, that she responded to kindness with more profound cruelty, that she didn't trust anyone enough to care, to hang around, that she was a product of the Wastes and always would be. Bad for him, in other words. He wasn't sure why he cared so little about that simple fact. Probably the same reason he still smoked.

"I'm sorry." Even now, she couldn't resist being difficult. "Make love?"

"You're being a bitch, and you know it." He moved forward to adjust the __ai-katean __in her hair, which was beginning to slip free. "Let me."

She turned, and he carefully tucked it into the uppermost lacing of the loose braid she was wearing, so that the delicate forget-me-notes wove among the inky strands of her hair. Treason had never looked so beautiful.

"I didn't," he said, and wasn't entirely sure why he did. "Sleep with her."

"That," Tayna said. "Might actually be worse."

He put his arms around her and she relaxed into them as though her bones had finally given out, putting her head against the warm fabric of his sweater and he said, "it's definitely worse."

"She's in the Selection as well." Tayna's voice came out muffled.

"It's different. She's got no chance of winning." He said it, and it sounded hollow even to him. He didn't know what to tell her. He didn't know __how__ to tell her.

Tayna lifted her head. In the dark, her eyes were tiny microcosms of the night sky itself. "And I do?"

He could only look at her.

"Even if I won," she said, her voice low and husky. "Even if I married Demetri..."

He winced to hear the name.

"Even if I became the queen," she persisted. "It wouldn't… I don't...__demusha, yesli khochesh' menya__..."

"__Plokhoye vliyaniye__." The words hung heavy on his tongue, like he had almost forgotten how to speak the language, like he had blocked it all out.

She said, "then things won't change anyway. Not even if I win."

"Yenifer," he said, very softly. "Don't you dare lie to me."

* * *

The rain in Whites was falling quick and softly, sheets of water falling like so much silk past the windows of the city hall in which the provincial council met. In times of peace, they convened five times in a month. In times of war, it was rare that they went longer than two or three days without needing to see one another. The meeting today was unusual in that it had been scheduled some six days ago, rather than six hours, and unusual again in that they were joined by the other northern councils – the hardened quasi-military command from Bankston and St George, the rustic council members from Baffin who arrived in flannel and leather like they were expecting a drinking session, the more refined crowd from Yukon who greeted the council from Whites like old friends, their long border having tied them together like a chain for so long. Even if Xue Bing and her husband had not pushed to accede to the Kingdom in Exile, Xue thought, it would have been inevitable once Yukon had switched its allegiance – they could have been very easily locked out of Illea and starved, given that Yukon could have easily blocked any material transports setting out from Likely along the Pacific channel. Instead, they had declared their treason in the very same document, and the peaceful transition had been made.

Peace – that was the most vital part of this whole business, Xue Bing thought. The northern provinces were the most prosperous of all the Kingdom, because not a drop of blood had been spilled in their winning. Maybe somewhere along the borders – Atlin, Ottaro, the rough division drawn across Hudson to lop off a chunk of valuable farming land with all the grace of a fieldside amputation – but here, in Whites, life had not changed, but for the removal of the portraits of Queen Ysabel and the slow reworking of school curriculum. There had been a few growing pains, particularly when the Crown had shut off their connection to the electricity plant in Likely, which had prompted a desperate scramble by engineers from Yukon and the Russian Union to repair before deepest winter hit and left them without light and heat. But, Xue Bing noted, for an area often dismissed as "the north", the northern provinces were really all the Kingdom had to point to as a success, particularly when they were still waging battles in Tammins and Fennley and Midston to dry and retain the land they had taken in the south. Land, Xue thought, that was populated by those the Crown could do without: uneducated, provincial, criminal. A poor foundation on which to found a country.

And yet, despite that, they had to meet like this, in the city hall that had once heard ever meeting begin with an oath of loyalty to the king in Angeles, and wheedle more money from the Warden for basic necessities of the most loyal members of the new kingdom, so that they could buy misprinted books from the Saharan Federation and canned goods from the Russian Union, what few nations recognised them as legitimate and would do trade with them. Xue didn't mind admitting that it hurt her pride, at least a little.

They sat in a crescent half-moon in the hall, Xue at one point and her fellow council member, Taichi Yukimura, at the other. Like the other provinces, Whites had six council members, relatively few for its immense size, but having more than fifty people in the room would have made for an immensely chaotic affair, so there was a leaner group of fifteen assembled today, empowered to make their case before the Warden for the entire region.

The Warden, Devery Atiqtalaaq, was Iñupiaq and her family had lived in the province that was now called Whites for longer than any other, since before it had been Exile, since before it had been Illea, since before it had been America, before it all. As a result, Xue often thought she was less concerned with what flag flew over her land, than simply ensuring that the people who dwelled therein survived to see their nation called another name, hundreds of years hence. She was a pragmatic woman who seemed to have no time for prettiness, always wearing her hair in the same two plain braids and wearing the same clothes fretted with fur, but over the course of their dealings, she had proved herself to be an acute negotiator, and for the time being, their priorities were the same.

"Thank you for convening," she said now. "Let us begin with the good news. Our men in the south have broken through the Zuni line and advanced into Fennley."

Xue could practically hear the effect this pronouncement had heard on the other members of the council. Fennley bordered Angeles, and the Crown was in Angeles. All the rest of the nation, the broad swathes of provinces who still clung loyal to the Dunin family, would fall like grain before the reaper's scythe once the palace was taken. That was, at least, the hope of the rebels. Not for the first time, she was glad that she was ensconced up in Whites.

"Now is not a time for celebration," Devery continued. "It is a time for pressing forward and taking advantage of momentum. Therefore..." She took a deep breath. "Our tithes have been increased, by a further sixty percent, in order to fund the next six weeks of battle."

"Unacceptable." Taichi was a dignified man with dark eyes and dark hair, just like his daughter's, although unlike Yue, he was starting to bald. "Our economy is already on its knees, Warden. We cannot sacrifice what little prosperity the north clings to in the name of perpetuating Demetri's bloodbath."

"Without taking the capital," Devery said, and Xue could see that it pained her to be taking the side of high command. "We will remain what we are: a loose alliance of traitors relying on the winter to shroud us. The only reason that Set's forces have not rolled over the Atlin border to retake our lands is because their attention has been drawn south, and they are not foolish enough to open up two fronts. If the rebellion starts to flag, starts to falter, starts to __fail__, then there is no reason that Ysabel's eyes shall not turn north. We must ensure that does not happen."

Xue said, "until winter falls, correct?" When she was sure that all eyes were upon her, she continued, "once the temperature drops. In Whites, during that season, we have an average temperature below minus fifty. Baffin reaches minus sixty. I assume, Warden, that they are also not foolish enough to emulate that oldest error of Napoleon to invade the north in the winter?"

"If our own infrastructure can even survive the same." Taichi cut in, his voice as cold as the lands that Xue now spoke of. To see the way their eyes met, one would have been forgiven for mistaking them for political rivals.

"Well," one of the representatives from Bankston said, "we'll direct focus there, then. Strip back on public expenditure, pump money into our generators and our food channels. Prepare to dig in."

"And then what?" Devery rarely sounded exasperated, but she appeared to be touching on it now. "Stop paying your tithes?"

"Renegotiate," Xue said, "from a stronger position. We are not suggesting treason, Warden."

"Not this time," Taichi said, and that was the problem, wasn't it, that they had not been won but had chosen to join the Kingdom of their own volition and might easily change their minds again and choose to leave. Xue could see that issue play out in Devery's eyes, sometimes, and she wasn't quite sure which the Warden would prefer to see. Instead, she merely nodded.

"An excellent proposal, Councilman Yukimura, Councilwoman Bing. Councilman Tulimaq, please draw up a report on the same – costs for the generators, for the agricultural side of things, where you want to draw the money from. Councilman Yukimura, please assist him." She looked down at her notes. "Further to that. King Demetri will be travelling to the Saharan Federation very shortly. Ostensibly a goodwill trip, but I am given to understand he'll be negotiating some trade deals as well." She didn't need to explain further – the north was really the only place that had anything worth exporting, oil and gold. Keeping the oil rigs going during the transition had been the combined work of Xue Bing, Taichi Yukimura and Anjij Khatri, while the gold mines – as well as most of the other mines – had just been a matter of the Warden hacking out deal after deal with Bataar Altai, the bastard who owned the greatest stretch of them in Yukon. He was sitting at the centre of the table now simply by virtue of that fact, unelected and yet important enough that he had to be included in council meetings. For a long time, Xue thought grimly, they had just been sitting on these vast stores of useless gold and irrelevant oil, with nowhere to send it but to the rebels in the south. Now, at least, they would be able to start selling. "I'm working hard to convince Givre to get the bulk of that income funnelled north, whenever it comes, but you know how Commander Ndlovukazi can be when it comes to funding his war machine."

"It's northern labour, northern goods, northern enterprise." Tulimaq's voice was cold. "It should go to the north."

"Couldn't agree more," Devery muttered, just loud enough that Xue knew she was meant to hear. "Right, before we get on to the matter of Killiniq High School, I have to touch briefly on the Selection."

In the rebel heartlands to the north and south, the Selection had proven to be ridiculously popular, despite the dearth of content that had actually made it to the screen. Of course, anything Devery Atiqtalaaq promised the northerners would prove popular. It was a quality that Xue knew the rebels had to appreciate and fear in equal measure - for it was all well and good to have a popular commander who could sway those she conquered to the reign of their new king, but a popular commander could easily a usurper make. It wouldn't take much for Atiqtalaaq to decide that she preferred being queen to her people over being a mere warden for the faraway rule of a young king.

"Yes." Even after all these years in the north of Illea, Bataar Altai still had a trace of a Mongolian accent clinging to his reedy voice. He was persistently paranoid, Xue knew, that the rebels would requisition his lands – his mines, his farms, his properties – and turn them over to the national good. It was the reason he had forced not just one, but both of his granddaughters into Selections, to curry favour with both sides and ensure he would secure a favourable position no matter what the result was. "How is my beloved __ach ochkin__?"

Xue wondered, rather unkindly, if he had to call her that because he had forgotten which twin he had sent to which Selection. Xue wondered, rather detachedly, if he realised that one twin winning one Selection would prove fatal for the other. Xue wondered, rather reluctantly, if it was a good or bad thing that she had only had the one daughter to enter the Selection.

When Bataar had informed the council of Saran's entry to the Selection, many had called him a fool to think that this would win him any clout whatsoever. Imagine, then, Taichi's reaction when they had been informed in that very same meeting that his daughter had not only entered without his knowledge but had been chosen to compete. It had been positively a boon for the rebel Selection, Xue knew – Yue's name was widely known, not only across Illeá, but abroad as well, particularly in Swendway where she had broken records both times that she had skated there. Having a name like that in Demetri's competition, Xue thought, gave them legitimacy in a way that just some other girl from Whites would not have. And so far, she seemed to acquit herself nicely, appearing composed and refined in all Report clips that had filtered up towards the north. The Altai girl could not say the same.

"Saran is safe for as long as Naran is," was Devery's clipped reply. Xue wondered what argument had raged between the landowner and the warden behind closed doors. "More gratifyingly, both northern girls remaining in the Selection have advanced to the Elite."

Xue struggled to contain her composure. She could see that Taichi was doing the same. "Is that quite correct, Warden? Saran Altai and Yue Yukimura are both in the top ten?"

"The top five," Devery corrected him, and there was a general commotion amongst the table as the council members murmured amongst themselves, some glimmer of hope sparking. Two chances for a northern queen, Xue thought – well, one chance for a northern queen, one chance for a Mongolian one. She could see the way Bataar's eyes shone at this news. "Councilman Yukimura, Councilwoman Bing, you must be very proud."

"Of course," Taichi said simply.

Xue added, "our daughter always makes us proud in all that she does."

* * *

"__Fáilte romhat,__ take your shoes off at the door." Alistair McIntyre was a broad-shouldered lighthouse keeper with a tightly cropped reddish beard and long, snaking crows feet beside his smiling hazel eyes that suggested he had spent much of his life squinting into the distance or staring into a very bright light. He was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, suggesting that this week, he was working the day shift at the tower and leaving the nights to his younger brother, as was habit. "Monika's rule. Don't ask me."

The McIntyre house was small and cozy, if cozy was a synonym for cramped – as soon as you stepped in the door, you were practically staring up the stairs, and had to skirt around a pile of abandoned shoes through a narrow wooden hallway to move into the tiny kitchen, where the table was covered with a woven cloth and the woman of the house, Monika Kim, was setting out the tea for the new visitor. Mouchard dutifully took a seat at the table as she put a cup out before him, and thank her quietly – for all their rat-faced visitor looked like a typical rebel recruiter, in a patched grey suit and scuffed black shoes, he knew his manners better than most the McIntyre family had encountered over the last few years of agonisingly slow transition. Hansport had transferred allegiance to the Kingdom, as the North had, and had been alone in doing so, for all their neighbours had remained stubbornly tied to the Crown, and so Hansport had been made a little enclave on the sea, the Kingdom's best sea gate to the west and yet stranded and isolated, utterly on its own.

Opal McIntyre's little sister, Ruby, as much as you could call a nineteen-year-old little, was hovering on the other side of the island, watching the rebel rather anxiously as she prepared a small plate of complimentary food for their visitor. The McIntyres had been Sevens, when they were Illeans, and the evidence of poverty still lingered all around, but Mouchard could tell that Monika was anxious to make a good impression on the representative of those who held her daughter's life in their hands.

"Mr McIntyre, Mrs McIntyre, please. Set down. Don't worry about the tea." The man in the grey suit was calm, and utterly collected, but even so, he could tell that they had been alarmed by his request to cut down on the niceties. Alistair eased himself into a chair opposite Mouchard, as Monika leaned against the kitchen island, and Mouchard said, "perhaps Ruby might excuse us?"

Alistair's jaw tightened. "Is there bad news?" He had a thick Scottish accent, despite his years in Illea, which made each word sound sharper and angrier than he perhaps intended – and Mouchard was sure that he intended them to sound plenty sharp and plenty angry.

Monika said, "Alistair, don't jump to any conclusions…."

"I just can't imagine," Alistair said, "why you'd need the bairn to leave if there was good news."

Mouchard inclined his head. "Very well. I am afraid it is, indeed, bad news. Opal has been removed from his Majesty's Selection."

"__Oh__," Monika said, and placed a hand flat on her chest, as though she could by pressure alone convince her heart to slow and steady. "Oh, thank goodness, you really did worry us, Mr…." She cast around for a name for a single moment, and then seemed to think better of it. "Oh, well, that's a disappointment for sure, but no matter. I'm sure she did her best."

"Mrs McIntyre, I'm afraid there's a little more bad news."

"Worse news?" Alistair's voice came out as a growl.

"Indeed. I would preface anything I say by adding that… a mission is underway to ameliorate the situation." Mouchard still wasn't sure if they were planning to rescue Opal, or kill her, and certainly was not prepared to tell the McIntyres of that fact.

"The __situation__."

"Following her elimination, Opal ought to have been removed to Hansport to begin her transition back into the community. Unfortunately, her convoy was ambushed en route, and she has been taken into the custody of the Crown."

"The custody," Alistair repeated. "Of the Crown."

"What does that mean?" Monika asked. "I don't understand. She was arrested? For being in Demetri's Selection? How can that have happened?"

"We are currently working to figure out exactly how that all happened, so that we can solve the situation."

"Where __is __she?"

"We are currently working..."

"I fucking ask you a question, and you'll fucking answer it. Where is she?"

"The palace," Mouchard said, "the palace in Angeles."

"Will she be alright?" Monika's eyes were darting about, and Mouchard could see that there was a sheen of tears rising within them. In her application to the Selection, Opal McIntyre had been asked why she wanted to join the process. Her answer had been, __I never want my mother to ever again go without food so that my sister and I can eat. __"She's alive, so she'll be alright? Or will they… oh god, please, tell me she'll stay alive."

"We believe she will be kept alive," Mouchard said, and omitted the unspoken __for now__. "She will not be harmed. She will be used in some propaganda exercises, so they'll want to keep her looking healthy, looking happy. She will be treated as well as anyone can hope to be treated in Morded's custody."

"I owe no fealty to this Demetri fellow," Alistair said. "I owe no fealty to the rebellion. But you lot promised me you'd look after my girl. I let her go, because she told me she wanted to go, and because you told me you'd protect her. What the __hell __kind of people are you? What the__hell__ kind of __king__ can he call himself?"

"Mr and Mrs McIntyre," Mouchard said softly. "I understand how you feel."

"You cannae __possibly__."

"Well then, all I can do is apologise. On my part, and on Demetri's."

"And what, pray tell, could you possibly have to apologise for?"

Mouchard said, "I was on the convoy when we were hit. I was meant to protect your daughter. Six men died trying to save her. It ought to have been seven."

Alistair said, his voice gruff, "how old are you, sir?"

"I'm twenty-two years old, Mr McIntyre."

"Twenty-two. And those men?"

"The oldest was twenty-two, like me. The youngest was sixteen."

"As I said," Alistair McIntyre said, and Mouchard could see that the anger in his eyes had been replaced by a very deep, very profound sorrow. "What the hell kind of king can he call himself?"

* * *

The driver's name was Peter Novak, and his older sister, Nina, was in the Selection. Not the Crown's Selection, he said, but the real one, and by real one, he meant the rebel one. He told this fact three times over as he drove his passenger over the border into Paloma, where there was word that, if you waited at the right station at the right time of the day with the right code word, you could catch transport into the Wastelands, and make your way to Layeni. He thought that maybe the festival had already started, Peter Novak wasted no time telling him, but the festival lasted four days, so there was still time to catch some of the celebrations, and if you were a rebel, there was no finer place to be. His passenger had just smiled.

Peter was not a rebel, though he came from a line of rebels, because his sister had told him not to be. He wasn't a miner either, though he came from a line of miners, because his sister had told him not to be that either. He wasn't much of anything, this Peter. He seemed to be __pustoy__. He had considered going against his sister's advice, he mentioned, as they coasted through gold sands in Paloma, but she wouldn't have been happy to find that out once she had got back from the Selection, and anyway, she was doing her part to make sure that he stayed safe and what good would he be doing if he repaid that gesture by going out and getting into trouble? No, said Peter, no, and so he had taken up a menial driving job, moving coal and sometimes fruit around the safer areas, doing his part without ever offering his life. He had moved coal up into Denbeigh last week, and brought livestock from the Tucker farm in Midston the week before. He was seeing a lot of the country, so much of which he had never seen before, like it was a new nation and not the Illea he had always known.

His passenger had just smiled. He had a gold hand. Peter had remarked on the prosthetic three times since he had sat into the car, and his passenger had just smiled each and every time. Peter had known several men with prosthetics, but such was the way of the mines in Allens. And at home, it was never just a hand – if a cave-in took your hand, it would take your whole arm. Mostly, people lost legs. Lots of people hobbling around Allens these days. Apparently, Mordred had a dire need for coal, that's what Peter Novak said. Peter had been working as a cart-pusher when Nina joined the Selection, but the need for coal had gone up, up, up, through the roof, and then they had tried to push him into a full mining job, so he had quit and taken up driving.

He liked driving, did Peter Novak. He liked the peace and quiet. He liked meeting new people. Bit of travelling did the soul a bit of good. He didn't help with the rebels per se, he said, and loved that phrase and used it plenty, __per se__, he was just doing a job, like so many other civilians. Just doing a job, and whoever was in charge was not a bother to them really, not so long as you could still hand over your big bags of coal and accept a big stack of cash in return – and hell, not even the cash had really changed, still had Mordred on the front, looking like a miserable bastard. So he hadn't technically broken Nina's terms. He wasn't really a rebel. He was just doing a bit of driving.

His passenger had just smiled. He was a very tall and very thin man, dressed in a black waistcoat and black suit pants, entirely too formal for the Wastelands. He had very dark hair and very dark eyes and very pale skin. He had one gold hand, and one hand with a signet ring on it, with a symbol on it: ****Ꮬ****. Peter had picked him up at the point where Zuni and Tammins and Sumner met, and the man had agreed to pay him more than twice his whole day's wages just to bring him as far as he was going. That was an easy prospect to agree to.

Artur Gildas had rather expected that it might be.

* * *

With Maria's sights trained closely on them, from her position half-a-mile away atop what had once been a McDonalds, the man they knew as Killmonger moved across the debris-strewn bridge to greet the rebel waiting for him in the middle. Thiago Wesick was always recognised by his purple coat, for it was whispered that he had taken it from the corpse of old king Trajan after killing him. Lethal wasn't sure how true that story was. Killmonger always said that he would not believe the General would have permitted such a gaudy display of such an abhorrent act. Killmonger had served under the General in the Illean military for three months, back when they were both simply Morris and just Klahan, and deserted three months after the General had, when he had found a little girl stowed in a closet in a raided house. It had only been that – knowing that the General would have and must have raised a good man, just as Killmonger had raised a good woman – that had persuaded Killmonger to let Atiena go to Demetri. Even so, he hadn't quite relaxed all this time that Atiena was gone. It was subtle, but after fifteen years fighting at his side, Lethal had grown to understand the subtlest of hints about what was going on in the older man's mind.

Killmonger stopped, and Lethal stopped just behind him, standing at his left shoulder, as Atiena had once stood at his right. Thiago Wesick was looking rather mutinous, but Lethal didn't think he should take it personally, because it was a similar expression to the one Lethal himself usually wore. There was a car parked at the far end of the bridge. There was a girl sitting in the passenger seat. For a split second, Lethal's heart jumped to think it might be his younger sister – but he would have known Atiena anywhere, and he could tell from the way this girl moved that it was not Atiena.

"Well," Wesick said. "There you are."

"Don't," Killmonger said softly. Lethal wondered if Wesick had been on the verge of saying Killmonger's real name, for surely the spymaster knew it.

"A pleasure to see you as well." Thiago Wesick reached into his coat and produced an envelope – another letter. The fourth that Atiena had managed to get to them, patchworked together to avoid censorship. Killmonger said there was a cypher embedded within to tell him that she was actually okay, and not just saying that she was. So far, all seemed to be okay. Lethal had not expected anything less. Atiena knew how to handle herself in whatever situation arose. "From Lady Atiena, with respects."

Lethal thought that Wesick might have been trying to prove a point by holding the letter just short of Killmonger's grip, so that he had to step forward to take it. Maria's rifle, he knew, would be tracking closely, and not missing anything. Killmonger was careful to leave the shot at Wesick's head unimpeded as he accepted the letter, and stepped back again. "With thanks," he mimicked, his voice sounded somehow grizzled. "She's good?"

"She is."

"Good."

"Got something for you."

"That so?"

"Don't get your hopes up." Wesick indicated the casket beside him, a wooden box about three foot by one, and pushed it across the bridge with a single press of his boot, so that it skidded and landed at Lethal's feet, and, after Killmonger gave him an approving nod, the younger man crouched and slid open the lid of the box. Nestled in a little pile of straw within was a set of five Hilgarri handguns, the sharpest kind. Lethal had never even thought he would see one, except in the hands of Crown soldiers who came for them. Wesick added, "__Hilgarri __means Lethal. Like your boy. Thought it was appropriate."

Always the same exchange, each time Wesick came to them – Atiena was good, and then some small token gift of ammunition or explosives or armaments. Lethal hadn't been able to understand the meaning behind it, the first few times it had occurred, but now he thought it was quite clear that Wesick had been building up a rapport and showing he could, in some small way, be trusted. Such a process did not and could never occur over a single meeting, but after six such meetings on this bridge, it was becoming clear that Wesick was unlikely to suddenly produce a revolver from beneath his purple coat and blow the Morrises away.

Wesick said, "I don't know if the news has yet reached Tammins, but we've broken through the Zuni line. We can advance east towards Angeles, or west into Tammins to consolidate land. Demetri wanted me to come and speak to you first. __Parlay__."

"Parlay."

"This is your territory," Wesick said, "you've been fighting the Crown forces here for more than fifteen years. We shouldn't muscle in without a… courtesy visit."

"Courtesy," Killmonger repeated. "So if I told you to get lost, would it matter?"

"I'd hope," Wesick said, "that you wouldn't."

Lethal moved his hands to sign out his feelings. Killmonger tactfully elected not to interpret.

"What do you need?"

Wesick shrugged. "Obviously if we succeed in taking the province, we can ensure that you and your family are compensated, cared for. From what Lady Atiena has told me, you've done good work. We'll need some information on the practicalities – patrols, caches, safehouses. We could do with your militia continuing to provide support on the ground, and look after your community. You're embedded here. People know you. They trust you. You clear out, we move in… that doesn't look like freedom. You think there's public support for the movement?"

"People don't like tyrants," Killmonger bit out. "Better you than Ysabel. The people will support you."

Lethal signed out, __for as long as you're better than Ysabel__.

Wesick said, "thank you." And then, his hands moving fluidly, if not quite fluent, he signed out a response: __we'll try to avoid becoming tyrants.__

* * *

There was someone tapping at the window of the little room that she had shared with the other Selected girl for the past three months, the lightest tick away at the glass. In her half-doze, lying on top of the blankets, lost in a haze with the world spinning in tight spirals around her, she had almost mistaken it for a bird. Instead, she slipped across the room and pulled open the curtains, her lips quirking into the faintest trace of a smile as the shape of Täj's face swam into view despite the gloom (sharp-featured and angled like he was still being starved, pale as the stars overhead) and she would know him anywhere. She wondered if she could draw his face from memory at this point.

She pushed open the window, and (without asking for permission) he put his hands on the sill and climbed into the room, the effects of the night's revels making him ever so slightly clumsier than usual, like his muscles had frayed away, like he was not merely rusty but ever so slightly misconfigured. She almost thought he was going to stumble when he landed (he certainly landed heavier than he usually would).

"Shut the fuck up." In the hush of the night, her voice was the barest hiss, just the fragment, the ghost, the memory of a sound. "People are asleep."

"You're not." Even for how dark it was, his pupils were like little black holes. She wondered what he was on, if this was just what he had been smoking with Atiena or if he had taken something else afterwards. No wonder, she thought, he was being brave, if you could ever ascribe such a label to this idiot.

"No." It sounded like a confession, but he had never known her to break under interrogation. "I'm not."

He stepped forward and cupped her face in his hands, his thumbs tracing over her cheekbones very gently. She could feel the scrape of his callouses against her skin, could feel how warm his skin was, even if the very tips of his fingers were still cold from the night air – but there was something comfortable about it, something very real and grounding, like she wasn't in Layeni anymore and maybe she never had been, maybe this whole thing had been a strange and awful dream. "Expecting someone?"

"What would you prefer I say?" She had to put her head back to look at him, and she was far from sober herself, so to steady herself she slipped her fingers through his belt loops. The chain-smoker, the paranoiac, the executioner in exile, product of the hinterlands. She didn't even need a name for him at this point, a description, a term. He was so simply and elementally himself.

He looked as though he was considering the question. "Just don't say anyone else's name."

"Not sure I even remember yours."

"Nothing new there."

He nudged his nose against hers, his stubble slid against her jaw and their mouths fell together, and it was as easy as that, as if I had never been otherwise. What had Fitzgerald said? __A tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.__ All the stories she had heard before her first kiss all those years ago had made it sound like your world should shatter, like you should be wholly transformed by the experience, but she had never found it to be anything other than what it was - skin against skin, him against her. He tasted as he always did, like black pepper and nicotine, vaguely bitter and yet she couldn't find herself caring all too much as he angled his mouth from her and kissed instead her cheek, her ear, her neck.

She said, softly, rather bitterly, "what prompted this?"

"Felt like I missed my chance earlier." She dug her fingers into his hips as he caught a particular spot on her throat. "The festival," he said, rather absently, "you know."

She said, "since when did you need an excuse?" and he quietened her with another kiss, the deep kind that had her pressing against him as though they could possibly be closer if she just arced her body into his the tiniest degree more. She knotted one hand in his shirt, pressed against the small of his back, pulling him harder against her__, __and felt him turn his head and slightly smile against her mouth, and could only respond by pressing her mouth against his, even harder again, like she was trying to take something back from him.

And yet he was, quite stubbornly, determined to be gentle, and seemed to find it even funnier that this frustrated her, so much that she had to just push him back onto the bed (__her __bed, though the thought crossed her mind) and climb into his lap and he put his arms around her and he held her and every time they paused to draw breath there would be a whispered exchange ("when is your roommate back?") and then one or the other would angle them back together so that the moment was, again, lost ("were you planning on fucking wasting time?"), and lost again, and lost a third time, and she still found it funny that he hadn't got sick of seeing her after all this time that he still paused and his eyes (she still didn't have a word for that look) and after all this time she still didn't know how to respond (but he never did did give her a chance to).

And anyway, at this point they so rarely needed to speak.

"You literally have your own room." Afterwards, she spoke against his skin, her cheek pressed against his pectoral, his hand tangled in her hair. When she laughed, he could feel her laugh reverberating through her bones. His bones as well. Almost like a shudder. She was thinner than she had been. He had been humming, very softly, some old song from one of her vinyls - __Monday, you can fall apart, Tuesday, Wednesday, break my heart, Thursday doesn't even start, it's Friday...__ "You really had to climb in the window to mine?"

"__Krasotka__." His voice was so languid, like it had melted, like it always sounded when he had been drinking too much. She slid her hand across the skin of his stomach, her fingertips seeking out the familiar scars along his abdomen. He could feel the cicatrices, where her fingerprints had been burned off all those years ago. "You believe I was thinking straight?"

"__Zhizn moya__." She mimicked the stretch of his syllables, the slight creak-and-strain of his voice, like it had been burned through over the years. "Are you ever?"

He had his eyes shut. She had always been jealous of his eyelashes – darker than his hair, like his eyebrows were, long and thick. And of his cheekbones, she mused, dark and hollow. He had always struck her as someone who had been composed far too delicately for the terror-and-waste of the lands beyond the south. Every time he had survived, he had surprised her. "I feel like you're setting me up for a line here."

He had bruises under his eyes from lack of sleep, and __barva__ dye streaked messily across his skin, and gunpowder clinging to his wrist. He looked worse than he had in a long time. She knew without looking that his nails would have been bitten short. "Never."

He had his arm around her waist and his cheek against her hair and his fingers tangled, very loosely, in hers. His heartbeat was slow and steady and he smelled like smoke and sage. "I just wanted to see you." The words were whispered, pressed into her hair as though they would be less treasonous if he did it that way. "Is that a crime?"

"Quite literally," she said. "Yes."


	25. Our March To Our Mortality

**Chapter 25: Our March To Our Mortality**

* * *

_There was calm, the calm that is called before the storm  
When we are compelled to pause and not act but be.  
_\- Mohsin Hamad

* * *

Vardi Tayna had dark green streaked on her throat and her collarbone, angling down towards her sternum. Liara tried not to think about how far down the colored marks might go, averting her eyes as the other Selected reached forward across the table to pluck an apple from the basket and said, quite casually, "everyone have a good night?"

The night had barely passed; Liara didn't even think it was bright outside yet. She had slept barely an hour, still fully dressed, in the narrow room she shared with Atiena, when she had heard movement in the room across the hall as someone slipped out the door and down the stairs. She had expected it to be Vardi Tayna, slipping out into the gloom to do whatever strange things occupied her frequent absences from the house. Instead, the rebel was sitting at the kitchen table now, her legs folded up beneath her as though boneless, her face still bearing that slight glow of inebriation. Täj, a bright point in the shadows, looked similarly as he descended the stairs quietly and came into the kitchen. He said, quite tiredly, "_my spletnichayem_?"

"No," Liara replied, also in Russian. "We are not gossiping."

Täj, clearly, had not expected her to understand, and gave her a look that made Liara feel as though he could see down to her bones. Vardi Tayna stayed where she was, rolling the apple along her arms and shoulders rather than eating it, and Eden, from where she was just about holding herself upright at the kettle, offered a little wave.

"I'm sure we _could_ gossip," Eden said softly, "if we could _think _of some gossip." An expression that Liara could not read flickered across her face, and was gone again before the girl from the capital could even think of hazarding a guess at what it could mean.

Liara wondered if any of the girls had broken the rules of the Selection during the revels. She wondered if it would matter if they had, given how lax this rebel Selection seemed to be about enforcing the archaic rules of the ritual. She wondered what colour Demetri's lips were, and what colour Täj's had been, before he had showered. She was sure that she had seen – she was sure they had spoken during the night, heads bent together, lips close – and yet she could not recall.

She hoped that neither of them had been green.

Vardi Tayna said, "we could always just make some up," and then swore as Täj reached out and knocked the apple from where she had balanced it on her head. "Dickhead!"

Eden said, thoughtfully, "I haven't seen... I haven't seen Atiena, have you?"

"She was with the twins," Elizabeth said, her voice thick, her lips green, her head set on her arms as though she thought this simple gesture would stop the world from spinning around her. "Good god, what was _in_ those drinks?"

"Ah," Eden said. Her gaze was fixed resolutely on the kettle, as though that would sober her up. "Excellent. That is… excellent."

Vardi Tayna said, with the tone of one who knew she was creating trouble, "did I see some green on Harjo, Tucker?"

Liz shook her head emphatically. "Lots of girls were wearing green, Tayna."

"Lots," Vardi Tayna agreed, "but that particular shade..."

"I gave my drink to the pale man. Maybe you should ask him about it?"

"Wick would never give me a chance," Täj said dryly. "His standards are too high."

Liz cut her gaze across to Täj and seemed inclined to laugh, but cut herself off with a groan as she noticed that Vardi Tayna had produced a bottle of berry liquor from under her jacket and was pouring herself another shot. Liara wasn't sure where the tiny girl put it all away. As though to rebuff criticism that was yet to be given word, Vardi Tayna said, "hair of the dog, darling, it keeps the hangover at bay," and threw it back, leaving her lips silver-and-scarlet. "Don't look at me like that. It's so rarely in season."

Eden said, "you know that's not exactly a _good _reason, right?"

A shrug was the only answer that the other girl could give. Without raising her head from her arms, Elizabeth Tucker silently pushed her glass across the table so that the rebel could fill her a measure as well. It was like watching self-immolation in slow motion, Liara thought amusedly, and wondered who would be the first one to tap out.

"I understand a congratulations is in order," Eden added, looking at Täj. "Something about you and Atiena and a knife throwing competition?"

"We came second," Täj said, as Liara quelled whatever part of her wanted to know when he and Atiena had become friends. Why they had become friends. Why every member of the Selected seemed to find the rebellion so easy to fall in with, so natural to find their place. "Hardly worth congratulating."

Vardi Tayna squinted at him. "Who won?"

"Agares and Uzo." A smile ghosted across Täj's face, barely perceptible. "Naturally."

Liz sighed deeply, and raised her head just long enough to tip back some alcohol. "Do you think Agares would adopt me if I asked?"

Liara thought of Raphael's words the night before:_ h__aving you all in the house... it's a comfort, truly, it is__._ "If you asked nicely," she said.

"Please and thank you," Täj added.

Liz's voice sounded like she was smiling into her sleeves. "I'm very polite."

"I heard you calling a soldier a scumbering jizzstain earlier," Eden pointed out gently.

"Yes," Liz agreed, "but I said it _so politely_."

"Where's Yue?" Vardi Tayna said suddenly. Liara wondered if the northern girl's absence had only just occurred to the rebel. On the one hand, it had been some three or four hours since Yue had slipped away from them. On the other, it almost impressed Liara that Vardi Tayna would ever think about someone other than herself.

"She probably went back with Saran," Liara said. "You know how close those two are."

Saran had taken charge of Eden for most of the night to ensure she was integrated into the group, and it was the other traitor Selected, as Liara and Eden were known, who spoke up now. "No, Yue left before Saran did."

The other traitor Selected. Liara had not realised she thought of Eden like that until the phrase materialised, fully formed, at the forefront of her mind. The _other _traitor Selected, which made Liara the first. She wondered if Eden thought the same. She wondered if Eden watched Liara as coldly as Liara watched Eden. She wondered if any part of Eden had begun to fall for the warm familiarity of Layeni and the fraternal camaraderie of the rebellion.

When Eden looked up, Liara looked away, and Vardi Tayna said, "Yue went to the Martyr's Needle, I think."

Täj said, "I'll go look for her." He set down his cup of tea – Liara had not noticed him making it – and straightened up. "Just to make sure she's okay."

Vardi Tayna glanced at him. "You sure?"

"Of course."

It struck Liara, not for the first time, how quietly protective of the girls that Täj had become over the long weeks here in Raphael's house – not in any manner carrying some lascivious implications, but in the same way that Liara imagined an older brother might be, the same way Demetri had once acted towards her and Mordred. Yue Yukimura was frequently the subject of these instincts, delicate as she seemed, and Liara recalled Täj insisting, quite quietly and quite politely, to accompany Yue to the market the first four mornings that she had walked there to do the shopping. He had not spoken more than ten words to her through the whole process, Yue had told Liara afterwards; he was not concerned about her being lonely, but apparently about her getting lost.

Liara would have put money on him having some younger siblings, now that she thought about it. Not for the first or last time, she wondered how long you would have to know this man to learn everything about him.

"She might be with the king," Vardi Tayna warned.

Liz said, not even bothering to hide the bitterness in her voice, "that would require the king to take an interest in the Selection, don't you think?"

Eden looked down at her teacup and said nothing, her orange-tinted lips turning in a slightly thoughtful smile. "Yes," she agreed, "that doesn't exactly seem his style."

"If she's with the king," Täj said, "I'll leave."

"Or join in." Liz's suggestion was barely audible from her position at the end of the table.

"Or join in," Täj agreed, pulling on the same green sweater he had worn the night before.

"See you at the picnic?" Vardi Tayna said, and the image of the executioner Täj, pale and glowering, at a _picnic_ was almost enough to make Liara laugh.

"Only if Mordred himself drags my corpse there."

Liara said, "I think I can arrange that", quite deadpan, and was rewarded with another of those smiles that were simply, solely, Täj – bright and slight and devastating, gone as soon as it was there, and oddly familiar, familiar enough that a part of Liara ached to know why she knew it.

"Give him my regards when you're talking to him," Täj said, "won't you?"

"No need for that," Liara replied. "You can tell him yourself when we take Angeles."

"We?" Vardi Tayna's voice was soft, suspicious, suggestive.

"We," Eden agreed, her voice like cracking glass.

This time, Liara looked at her, and it was Eden's turn to look away.

* * *

"Oh, no." Yue hadn't realised she was able or willing to disagree with the king, but as Demetri turned to look at her with the expression of a dog that had just been kicked, she found that she could say no to his suggestion not just once, but twice and three times. "Nooooo. Thank you. But no."

"No?" He smiled as he said it, like even he realised that absurdity of verifying what she had said when she had said it over again. "Are you sure?"

"Certain."

"Okay," he said, and Yue blinked to realise that he had no follow-up questions, intended no further interrogation, required no justification. He just shrugged and put his hands in his pockets – and god, what was it about that simple gesture that stripped the years from his face and his build and left him just another young man, sitting beside the river as the sun crept over the horizon, looking at a girl with something soft in his eyes. "We can do something else."

"I'm sorry," she said, "no, really, it was thoughtful and so so sweet and I appreciate it so much, but I just don't…. you know, I don't…."

"Yue," he said. She liked the way he said her name. "You never have to explain."

"But I _want _to. I'm… you know." She shrugged, a little helplessly. "I'm Yue Yukimura."

"You are."

"I just don't really do it anymore," she said. "Skate, I mean. I haven't done it in ages. And I'm so out of practice. I'd just disappoint you..."

"Yue," he said. She thought there was a slight hint of laughter in his voice. "You could never disappoint me."

Oh. _Oh_. Yue wished he hadn't said that. Yue wished he hadn't set himself up to be wrong, so obviously wrong, so awfully wrong.

"Okay," she said. "I mean. Sure."

"You didn't like skating?"

Yue surprised even herself. "I loved skating."

He cocked his head, and she elaborated without him asking the obvious question.

"It was… everything else around it."

"I think I understand."

"All the eyes. All the pressure. Everyone watching, and judging."

"Yue," he said, and that was the third time in so many seconds that he had said her name, and maybe she should have been sick of it but she wasn't. "It's just us."

"Just us."

"No one watching."

Yue laughed. "Are you giving me permission to fuck up?"

Shit. Was she allowed to swear in front of the king? She couldn't recall. She couldn't recall having done so before. But after these long hours beside the river, discussing books in person rather than on paper, she could not quite imagine Demetri rebuking her for a curse word. She could not quite imagine Demetri rebuking her, truth be told. He had been exceptionally gentle – in movement and in words – for the whole time that they had watched the fireworks, and watched the stars, and watched the night fade into daylight again.

"I'm mandating it."

"What a strange abuse of royal power," Yue mused, and that pulled a laugh out of him.

"So if you change your mind," he said, "and that's _if_. You know where I am. I've always wanted to learn."

Yue blinked again. "You've never learned?"

"To ice skate?" Demetri shook his head. "When would I?"

She didn't know. She had just presumed that it was one of those things that little princes and little princesses did, when they were little, wrapped in jewel-toned woollen scarves and accompanied by austere looking nannies. She had never really considered why she thought it such a natural component of any decent childhood. Maybe because it had been such an obnoxiously large part of hers.

But then, Demetri had been a little prince for such a short time.

"It is warm in the Wastelands," she said, and could have throttled herself for what a stupid sentence that was. Yes. It was indeed warm in the Wastelands. It was a warm place.

"Yes," Demetri agreed. He had the faintest trace of orange berry staining the corner of his lip, and Yue focused her gaze upon it. "Not much opportunity to learn."

"You're putting me in a corner here."

"I'm not."

"Of course you are. If I don't volunteer to teach you, I'm the bad guy."

"You said that. Not me." He paused, and went on in a tone that suggested he was on the verge of being playful, using literature to poke at her in a manner that she was likely to accept in good fun. "But you _did_ find it so sad when Koharu refused to teach Hifumi how to fence in _Kori no Shinzo_."

"Yes," she said. "Because Koharu was sabotaging her chances with him." She paused. "And because I don't usually model my behaviour after the conduct of fictional characters in romance novels."

"I imagine it would be much more fun," Demetri said softly. "Much more dramatic."

Yue's leg, hanging over the ice, barely traced the surface. It looked thick enough to support them, she noted, and hated herself for noting it, because it meant that her resolve was wavering. But Demetri was right. There was no one else around.

Some juvenile part of her whispered that she hadn't got her date with Demetri yet. Was she really turning down her chance to get to know him better? To have him pay her some small bit of attention and time? To stay in the competition, and take advantage of her new position of Elite?

"I didn't think you needed more drama in your life," she said, and he nodded in agreement. His hair looked like dark gold in the red light spilling over the horizon, askew after a whole night outside, though Yue thought his habit of running his hands through his hair was more to blame for the disarray than the wind was. His eyes were such a dark green, they looked almost black. She hadn't noticed until now that he had the shadow of stubble on his jaw, and she hadn't noticed until now how much it suited him, how much less severe he seemed with the slight trace of relaxation marking his face.

"I don't think so either." And, again, almost like she had manifested it, he ran his hands through his hair and shook his head. "Well. A _little _more never hurt anyone. Or so everyone keeps telling me."

She laughed. "You're too boring for their taste?"

"Too indecisive." He had the same expression as the night before, when he had told her that he was at risk of melancholy – a kind of peaceable expression, like he knew precisely what his flaws were and was at peace with them. Of course, indecision seemed like quite the flaw for the king, for the leader of the rebellion.

"They say," she said cautiously. "A good relationship…" She paused. "Or friendship. Is built on balancing out each other's flaws."

"Do they say that?" Demetri smiled. "Are you very decisive, Yue Yukimura?"

"I'm working on it." She got to her feet, a little less gracefully than she would have liked, a little more clambering involved than was strictly elegant, and hoped he hadn't noticed. "So, if you're free this afternoon…" She gestured towards the ice, all her bravery evaporating even quicker than she could have imagined.

"This afternoon?"

"Would you rather do it now?"

Demetri looked thoughtful. "I don't have any skates with me. This afternoon, then."

He jumped to his feet. Yue had seen a few of the rebels do this, but it always surprised her, especially when it was a man as bulky as Uzokuwa, who seemed too large, hewn from stone, to move with such grace. On Demetri, of course, the motion looked utterly natural.

"Okay," Yue said, and smiled. "Okay. This afternoon."

"I'm really looking forward to it," Demetri said, and Yue smiled again.

"Yeah," she said. They had been sitting closely together, and that had seemed quite natural, but now they were standing closely together and that seemed rather less so, rather more dangerous, rather more rich with potential or risk or _something_. "Yeah."

Demetri smiled and she thought he was going to say something else, but then she realised he was not looking at her but was looking past her, at something beyond them, and when she turned to smile, she saw that there was a figure on the nearest bridge, watching them, a figure that had not been there before.

Demetri said, "I'll walk you back to Raphael's."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course." He smiled. "I'm a gentleman before I am anything else."

"Before a king?"

He answered quietly. "If I had any say in it."

* * *

"Jori!"

It was instinct. At the sound of her name, Marjorie turned. She was half-expecting, half-hoping, that it would be one of the girls she had been close with at the safe house. Soledad, maybe, or Elizabeth, or even Eden Lahela. Instead, it was, to her total surprise, the dagger-shape and sard-coloured skin of one Ekaitza Jones, the girl from the northern wastes. She had shaved her hair at some point since her elimination, Marjorie noted. She returned the former Selected's four-fingered wave, and went to meet her, kicking up little clouds of sand as she did so.

They were at a refugee camp in Labrador, just north of the front line in Hansport, where the Crown was trying to seize back land from the Kingdom of Dust and everyone with sense had fled to one territory or the other. The ground had been churned up into dust and mud, and everywhere you looked, there were more people, people upon people, thronged together into dense crowds. Thiago had disappeared amongst them quite expertly, and Marjorie had been left behind in the milieu. Not that she minded all that much – a good journalist knew when to observe, and observe she had.

Ekaitza had a large scar under her right eye, red and angry, raised into a thick, knotted ridge. It hadn't been there before. Marjorie remembered whispers amongst the lower castes in the safe house that the Jones girl was involved in smuggling in the north. Had she returned to crime, even after her time in the Selection? Or was this some souvenir of the rebellion?

"Ekaitza," she said, and the two girls shook hands. It seemed most natural, Marjorie thought, because Ekaitza had never looked like the hugging kind. There was a sinewy strength in her grip; Marjorie resisted the urge to shake out her hand when they separated. "Didn't expect to see you here."

"You either." The northern girl's chin jerked in the direction of the medical camp. "Here with my… with a medical team. Wasn't expecting the Selection to be here."

"It isn't. Just me."

"Ah. I'm sorry to hear about that."

"Not at all," Marjorie replied. "Working with a humanitarian organisation now, international oversight for the refugees. I'm seeing more of the rebellion than I ever would have at the safehouse..."

"Isn't that the truth." Ekaitza moved her head slightly, her wolfish eyes darting back and forth as though considering who might be listening in. "Do you keep in contact with any of the others? The Selection?"

Marjorie considered lying. "Not really, but I get some things through the grapevine. They're the Elite now, so they're kept under quite tight security."

"No kidding? _Corvina Rouen_ made the Elite?"

Marjorie almost hesitated, and she could tell that Ekaitza had seen this, and she could tell that both girls were highly aware of the lie implicit lying beneath the surface when Marjorie said, "when have you known Cor not to get what she wanted?"

Ekaitza's smile was more like the baring of teeth. "She's a stubborn one, alright. How are the others? Saran, Yue, Lissa?"

Marjorie didn't remember Ekaitza being close to Lissa. She had always got the impression that the blonde girl rather irritated the dark-haired one, with her ditziness and flights of fancy. She had always thought Elizabeth Tucker was the only one who got along with Lissa Dove. "Fine, I think. Last elimination I heard about was, uh, Atiena Morris."

Not really a surprise for either of them, she could tell.

"Pity." There was something cold about Ekaitza's eyes. Marjorie remembered that now. "So that's those four and Liara Lee..."

"Vardi, Eden and Liz. I think."

"And Nina?" Ekaitza's gaze was almost a physical weight on Marjorie's skin.

Marjorie controlled her expression. "Eliminated a while back. Same time as Sol."

"Huh. I would have put money on her as the One. Only girl Dunin seemed able to tolerate."

"Same here. Nina or Liara Lee."

"Well," Ekaitza said. "We'll have a queen before long. And when we do, we'll still have to shit and eat breakfast. Life won't change all that much."

"No," Marjorie agreed. The war would not cease whatever day the One was chosen. The world would keep turning. The woman Demetri called wife would not, ultimately, make much of a difference.

It was easier to see that clearly, once you were out of the Selection.

Ekaitza clapped Marjorie on the shoulder. "Look after yourself, Jori. We're going to have a big party in Angeles once this is all over, and I expect to see you there."

"Don't jinx us, Jones."

"Never." Ekaitza had the shadow of something moving behind her eyes. "If you see the girls before me, give them my love, won't you?"

"Of course."

She didn't mean the Selection. Marjorie knew that without asking. She meant the girls she had been friends with – Yue, and Saran, and Corvina. Rouen's little clique, the northerners plus the enigma from the south.

Marjorie did not tell Ekaitza that it was unlikely she would ever see Cor again.

And Ekaitza did not tell Marjorie that she was on her way to do just that.


	26. In The Humming Wires

**Chapter Twenty Six: In The Humming Wires**

* * *

__He'll wrap you in his arms, and tell you that you've been a good boy.___  
___He'll rekindle all the dreams it took you a lifetime to destroy.__

\- Nick Cave

* * *

The little village of Layeni lay before him, its streets winding and unwinding like the grey tendrils of a spilled bottle of ink. It was like so many of the tiny hamlets strung along the spine of the Wastelands, the thin artery of the Kingdom in Exile along which the pulse of the rebellion throbbed. The tiles and the cobbles and the flowers were all aglow with color, the streets now stained with the bright detritus of the first night of the lover's festival. From here, it all looked so delicate, so fragile, so frail. One could almost imagine crushing it in a single hand, curling up all its edges.

And here, high above Layeni, his Yenifer was waiting for him.

She was wearing a pale green sweater several sizes too large for her, her thin frame positively drowned in the fabric, and her hair had been scraped roughly back into a braid, leaving strands escaping every which way. She was sitting cross-legged on the ground, with the ease of one for whom comfort was still not an entirely familiar concept, and rubbing at the mark on her arm as though she still harboured some hope of pulling off her own skin.

And in that moment, she looked so much like her sister that she was almost painful to look at.

"Little one. You're all grown up."

She looked up. In her eyes – there was no simple label for that emotion. It was not quite fear. It was not quite respect. If he was being sentimental, he might have thought there was some pale vestige of affection there.

But he was not a sentimental man.

"Still a cunt?"

"Yes," Yenifer said. "That's how I tend to be." That was true. He had never known her to be otherwise.

"And I suppose you tend to be too much of a cynical bitch to give your brother a hug as well."

Her lip curled. "I don't remembering you signing a register."

"Mere semantics among kin. More kin than any down below."

No one looking at them would ever have mistaken them for kin, of course. They weren't even of the same race, though they shared very dark hair and very dark eyes. He was very tall and very thin, with the face of a brute, and he had long thin fingers with which he reached into his waistcoat to pluck a letter from the pocket within. He extended his hand out to Yenifer. "His Highness sends his regards."

Yenifer's jaw was set tightly, tense like the string of a violin, and just like the string of violin there was a clear risk of a snap. "I imagine he does." She moved to rip the envelope from his hand, but he jerked it back again, cocking an eyebrow as he did so.

"Ah, ah. _Kakaya glupaya suk__a__._ What bout mine?"

"It's done. I've sorted it."

"Have you." He dropped the envelope almost lazily into her hand. "Good girl."

The thrum of tension along her jaw once again, like a muzzled dog trying desperately to refrain from biting. "I do try to be."

"I hope," he added, and tucked his golden hand back into his pocket. "That this is all worth it in the end. You'll have to win now… else you've just judased all your little friends for naught."

Her eyes were set on his shoes. "_Da_."

"You'll name your first son after me, won't you?" The man with the golden hand smiled. "I always thought King Artur had a ring to it."

And all Yenifer could say was, quite softly, "derivative."

* * *

Today, as it sometimes was, the window in Cor's cell was dark and she could not see her sister's form in the adjacent room. Sometimes, when they did this, Cor felt a small needle of fear slowly slip into the chambers of her heart as what they might be doing to Khione when the lights were off. Sometimes, she was – and oh, how Corvina Rouen hated to admit this, even if only to herself – sometimes, she was afraid.

Only sometimes. Only sometimes. Most of the time, she just got a little angrier, and the knot of rage twisted a little tighter in her gut, and she felt her heart harden a little against what would be, what must be. Oh, they would regret this. They didn't know it yet, but they would regret this, more than they regretted anything else they had ever done. She would make them regret it.

Launching a rebellion would seem a picnic compared to what she would do to them. She told herself this again, and, yes, she meant it as much this time as much as she had the first time she said it. Demetri's head on a spike. Thiago's head on a spike. Whose else? Wickaninnish. Uzohola. The whole damn Inner Circle.

This thought was Cor's main companion as she fell asleep – the scarce hours that she could sleep in this cell, of course. The same part of her that had compelled her to eat the food she was given in order to conserve her strength for whatever came next also compelled her to take whatever scarce hours of rest that her mind and the chill damp of her cell allowed her.

There was a powerlessness here, a lack of autonomy that galled Cor to her very core. This whole situation reminded her – painfully, uncomfortably, hatefully – of the orphanage in which she had spent the first years of her life. She had been in that place for thirteen years, from the day that her parents had been put to death to the day that she had been turned out onto the streets of Angeles. Thirteen, she mused, was an unlucky number for her. It always had been. She had been here for much longer than thirteen days, of course, and that, to her mind, meant that her luck was probably about to turn.

That, or things were about to get much worse.

They hadn't allowed her much. Thiago had ordered that they not issue her any cutlery with her food, and an early attempt to smash the plate given to her had proven fruitless and time-wasting. The feet of the bed had been welded to the floor; the food they provided was bland mash of _something _that she did not think likely to contain any poisons or acidic qualities; and her clothes proved, rather infuriatingly, unsuitable to creating either a garrotte or a noose.

That left Corvina Rouen in a bit of a pickle. But Corvina Rouen was not the type of person who gave up easily.

She was in a cell, and everyone knew you could escape a cell in one of seven ways. Seven, of course was a luckier number. You could go out through the window, if they had given you a window; you could go out through the light source, or the ventilation source, if there was any chance that it would go somewhere that wasn't even less pleasant than where you already were; you could go out through the walls or the floor, if you weren't twenty five feet under the ground already.

Or you could go out through the door.

The dramatic part of Cor really wanted to pick that last option, if only for the sake of her reputation.

But that, of course, meant finding some way out the front door and _that_, more than anger or fear, was what kept Corvina Rouen awake at night.

It was lucky, then, that she was awake that night when Ekaitza Jones came to her door with a rifle on her back and blood on her hands.

Blood on her face as well, now that there was light on in the room, and Corvina could see around her. Ekaitza looked worse for wear – not just her hair, shaved down to a length that suggested her scalp would make a handy substitute for sandpaper if any situation called for it. She had a small silver ring on the little finger of her right hand, with a sharp hooked spike protruding from it, its edge marked with red like rust. It looked as though someone had tried to gouge out one of her eyes – that was a favourite tactic of the black widow queen, Cor knew. But as Ekaitza drew closer, it became more apparent that this wound was more like a bullet's point of entry, mostly healed but still obvious. A mark against a member of the Selected, Cor wondered, or against a member of the rebellion?

Or, if Ekaitza had considered Cor's offer as carefully as she had seemed to – a member of Pandora?

"Long time," Ekaitza said, "no see."

Cor sat up on her cot. "This," she said, "Is unexpected. Where is Zenith?"

Ekaitza squinted at her with an expression that suggested Cor could have been speaking fluent Akkadian and would have been making more sense. "I didn't see any zenith on my way down." She gestured that Cor should stand. "We have about… three seconds to run."

When she stepped back to the door, Cor saw that she was stepping over a body. The prone form of the one-armed rebel who usually accompanied Thiago – what was his name again, Phineas? Or was it Mikhail?

Cor never had learned the difference between them. She guessed now she never would.

The first thing that struck her, upon stepping out into the hallway, was how low the ceiling was and how unfamiliar it looked after so long in the cell. The floor was dimly-lit by what looked like emergency lighting strips running along the walls where skirting boards would have been in an ordinary house; the general bunker-like atmosphere of the whole space meant that the identical pattern of the corridors that unspooled like thread in either direction to the pathways that lay in the hotel above did little to comfort her.

After so long in the cell, this did not feel like freedom.

"Alright," Ekaitza said. "Let's go." She started walking away, only to stop after just five steps when she realised Cor wasn't following. She turned; in the dark, her eyebrows, her eyes and her mouth were just black slashes against the shadow of her angular face. "Rouen."

Cor wasn't following; Cor was walking away, down the hallway to the next room along, the twelve to her cell's thirteen. "This one."

"_Rouen_. We don't have time."

"I'm not leaving until you open this door."

Ekaitza was scowling; even in the dark, Cor could tell that much. "I took a big risk coming to get you. I put a lot on the line. Can you swing your dick some other time?"

"You're Pandora. You do as I say."

And as soon as she had said that, Cor knew she had fucked up.

Ekaitza took a step towards her. "I've got nothing to do with your little… street gang." Before Cor could bristle at the description, the northern smuggler pressed on. "Lissa Dove was murdered, and she said that you were next. I came to get you before that happened. This is an act of charity, not service."

Cor recoiled. Dove… murdered? When? How?

Her next? No. Thiago would have executed her already if that was to be her fate. She would be rotting six feet under if she was meant to die at their hands.

Unless.

Unless there was, and she was quite sure there was, some split in the rebellion. Some bad blood, some bad faith, some actor in the shadows who had murdered one of the Selected and was waiting for their chance to come down here and kill Cor as well.

Against orders. Cor would never have stood for the like of that in her organisation but, it was rapidly becoming clear, a civil war that sprawled so wide and bloody was rather harder to keep into line.

So who would it have been? Tayna? Täj? Thiago, waiting for the moment that Demetri was not watching?

Or maybe it went deeper, more convoluted than that. Cor knew what she would have done. Maybe Phineas – or was it Mikhail? – had been told to come down here and kill her, to remove a thorn from the rebellion's finger, and then they would be dragged out in front of the Kingdom of Exile and denounced as a traitor and executed in turn.

Plausible deniability. That's what it was all about.

And it struck Cor again that this could very well be what was happening, but with Ekaitza wielding the knife. But the smuggler was still standing in that gloomy circle of half-light, looking mutinous, with the air of one who was ready to sprint away rather than wait for Cor to do what she wanted to do.

Cor paused, and took a deep breath. So many days under the earth, away from other people… you caught flies with honey, after all. And so, she spoke softly. "Jones. They have my sister."

And she saw Ekaitza relent. "I feel our three seconds slipping away," she muttered, rather bitterly, as she retraced her steps back down the hallway towards Cor. "If we die down here, I'll kill you, Rouen."

* * *

Atiena didn't think she had ever had the pleasure of experiencing a true hangover, but waking up without knowing where she was – that was an experience with which she was not totally unfamiliar. What was a little stranger, if she had to say, was that she had a quilted blanket drawn around her shoulders and a coat rolled up under her head and her shoes were lying neatly beside her, though she was otherwise fully dressed. And it didn't feel like she had a black eye, or bruised knuckles, or a broken wrist. That was very strange, all told.

That, and she was in a room she did not recognise.

That was enough to make her jerk upright, reaching for a gun, but her instincts were quelled at the soft voice which called from the adjoining kitchen. "Don't worry, _iswekile__, _you're alright."

Uzohola stepped around the couch and into Atiena's field of vision. In the pale light of morning, Atiena could not help but think she looked… was radiant the word? Unearthly. Light fragmented through her golden-brown corkscrew curls, splitting into tiny strands of glittering red and bronze. And her skin. Uzohola was darker than Atiena, the colour rich and warm. She was wearing what Atiena thought at first was a silk robe, though she wasn't sure where in the Wastelands you'd find silk. She still had a dark blue mark on her cheek, and the corner of her cupid bow lips. Who had been wearing blue?

"Did you sleep okay?"

"I… uh, I…. yes. I slept well. Where…?"

"This house was requisitioned by the rebellion when Layeni swore allegiance to us. Xïta has been staying here during the Selection."

Xïta… that was the blonde man Uzohola had been sitting with for most of the night before. Atiena thought he held some minor role in the rebellion's Ministry for Social Matters; it wasn't a part of the Kingdom that she was all that familiar with, when it came down to it, but it was a reminder, as so much in Layeni was, that at the root of all of this fighting and killing was the hope for a new nation. She had spent much of the previous night subjected to a lecture from Wren, the blue-haired Voice of the Report, about the difficulty in practice of eliminating the castes which had existed in Illeá for so long.

"The Anchorites do fine without them," Wren had explained, Farid asleep with his head resting in her lap. "But if you have lived your whole life with a number – what were you, Lady Atiena, a Six? – and then that number is taken from you…"

And Uzokuwa, on the other side of the fire, had said rather darkly, "one cannot change one's ways so easily."

So they had whole teams of people whose sole role was integrating the different social strata of the conquered land, of teaching Twos and Eights how to sit at the same table and do the same work and not see one another as different species of human being. Atiena thought this was probably the type of work that Xïta did. Or maybe, as his name suggested, he was just another Anchorite pressed into the ranks of the revolution. He would not have been the first, or the last.

And there he was, sitting at the little wooden table in the kitchen adjacent to the living room in which Atiena had been sleeping. He was dressed, yes, but in that hasty half-dress of early morning, not intimate enough to be unseemly but enough so that Atiena felt forced to avert her eyes. Ah. Yes. She did recall mention of Uzohola's… _lover _seemed too archaic a word, and yet to think of a leader in the rebellion of dust having something as trite as a _boyfriend…_ it was the same problem that Atiena had always encountered whenever she tried to put a name onto what she and Veronica had had, back when she and Veronica had had it. She had never known what to call Veronica.

Now, of course she knew what to call her. Judas. Traitor bitch, if she was feeling unkind, and she often was, when she thought about Veronica. What could she say? Having your heart torn out tended to create a bit of bitterness.

She didn't know what to say now either, except a hasty, "I'll leave you two in peace" as she pulled on her shoes and stood. She had slept on the flowers in her hair – they had been crushed beneath curls, so that a few stray petals now fluttered down in front of her face to land on the couch and carpet as she turned to pick up the jacket that had been placed under her head. It was a familiar one – Uzokuwa's. Yes, she was beginning to recall now. Uzokuwa had officially welcomed her into the ranks of the military of the Kingdom of Dust.

And she was late for her very first patrol.

"Are you sure?" Uzohola's eyes were the warmest golden brown that Atiena had seen, and they were wide now. "We can prepare you some breakfast…."

"No. Thank you. I'm, uh, your brother is expecting me, actually." Atiena grinned, rather hastily. "Don't want to make a bad impression on my first day."

"Uzokuwa has a soft spot for you. I think you'll be okay no matter what." Uzohola paused, and held something out to Atiena – her Sako TRG_, _the sniper rifle that had been taken off her upon her entry to the Selection. Returned to her now, upon her elimination. That was it, Atiena thought, that was it, she was out of the ranks of the Selection and into the ranks of the rebels – back, in all truth to where she belonged. "Don't forget this," Uzohola said wryly. "Oh – you'll be accompanying us to the Sahara Federation once the festival is ended. Demetri Dunin's official bodyguard, if that suits."

Atiena took the gun. Its weight was familiar and comforting, like having a limb reattached after many years of phantom pains. "I was hoping to finally get some time away from him," she said, and was rewarded with a laugh from Uzohola.

"Oh," she said, "yes, we hit that point about ten years back. I'll see you at lunch, I suppose?"

"Yes," Atiena said, "you suppose," and then, because she didn't really know what else to say, she turned and she walked away, gun in hand, to join her patrol.

They were all dead when she found them.

All of them. All the rebels she had come to know, all the young men she had drank with the night before, all the young women that she had helped to support over to the river the night before so that they could press their foreheads against the ice and pray not to vomit, at least in front of whatever other young rebel they were trying to charm.

Now, here, lying dead, dead and still and staring: Farid, the dark-haired Announcer of the Report with the voice like caramel and half-finished tattoos on his back; Anzu, the commander with the shaved head and massive burns on the left side of her face who coughed out her laughs on the few occasions she did; Bruno, the little Layeni native who had claimed to be eighteen when everyone else in the patrol knew he was only thirteen at most; Aapeli, the Finnish sniper who had come west to Illea and south to the Kingdom because he thought the cause was pure; Mikhail, one of the bleach blonde twins distinguishable only by their number of remaining limbs, until you learned that Phineas slouched; Wren, the blue-haired Voice of the Rebellion with a smile like lightning….

No, Wren was still moving. Wren was still moving. Atiena ran to her, dropping to her knees, and pulled the girl over onto her back, staring down at the scarlet marks peppering her jacket. Her mouth was still blue, Atiena thought, rather dazedly. She hadn't even got the chance to wash her mouth.

Killmonger's voice was in her ear, as physical and tenable as if he was really there, standing over her, watching and listening and protecting. _Triage, baby girl._ Wren was still breathing, still bleeding. She still had breath, still had blood. That was good. Not everyone could say the same. That was good. _Triage and secure. _Whoever had done this could still be around here. Whoever had done this _was _still around here. They had to be. They would be here, and they would be watching. Where…?

Dammit, the Selection had made her soft, had made her _rusty. _

"Wren," she whispered. "Wren, what happened? Wren, stay with me…."

A shadow fell over them. Wren's eyes, still and staring, did not so much as flicker. Atiena reached for her rifle, and could not hold back the little cry that rose from her throat as a boot came down on her hand and crushed her knuckles into the ground. _Fuck!_

"It's a shame." The name came to her, without her needing to really think about it. _Ndlovukazi. _"I did like you, Atiena. It really is a shame."

* * *

Corvina Rouen was free.

Marjorie Vermudez was not sure of the reaction she had expected from Thiago, when this news reached them in Fennley, where she was still acting as his assistant. However, it was fair to say that a smile and a glance at his watch was not precisely how she had expected him to respond.

"I see," was all he said, and the messenger had gone away, and Marjorie had risked a quick glance over at Thiago only to see that he had returned to the business of sewing up his coat. He had torn a hole in the sleeve sometime back in Hansport – Marjorie couldn't say for sure when or where, only that he seemed to treat it as the highest priority to restore it again. It was, after all, the coat that had belonged to King Trajan, if you believed the stories. If you believed the stories, it was the coat that the General had taken from the still-warm corpse of the dead king and awarded to his spymaster lieutenant, just before he had taken the dead king's son. And it was (again, according to the stories) the most valuable thing Thiago Wesick had ever allowed himself to own.

Marjorie didn't make a habit of believing stories, but she believed that one.

He continued at his business, and Marjorie continued at hers: methodically breaking down Thiago's rifle, and then reassembling it as quickly as she could, her hands moving with an uncertainty and caution even after so many hours of practice. She couldn't be too hard on herself. She had never handled a gun before that week, but a shotgun had been thrust into her hands at the Waverly border with instructions that if a Crown soldier came at her, she was to aim for the centre of mass and shoot. That was it – no ammunition, no tutorial, not even a strap to carry it by.

"And if two come at me?" she had asked, rather dryly.

"Oh," Thiago had said, "turn it on yourself."

They had not encountered any Crown soldiers, and that evening, Mouchard had sprawled in the dust and shown her how to load more shells, how to eject the spent casings, how to aim and how to clean. "This is an old one," he had said, in that low rumble of his. "Very old gun. Likely to jam. This gun will get you killed, little Jori."

Marjorie had gone straight to Thiago and demanded a new one.

To her surprise, he had given her one the very next day. Appropriated from the Crown munitions factory in Paloma, he had said shortly, and shown her how to remove the safety. He had repeated the advice from the day before: always aim for the centre of mass. Squeeze the trigger. Pray.

Marjorie had written down this advice as though it were something esoteric, and returned to her practice. She had been steadily improving all afternoon but now, with those words in her mind – _Corvina Rouen is free _– she found herself unable to focus as she once had, her hands slipping past each other, the components catching and sticking against their siblings. Corvina Rouen, she thought, is free. And Thiago, head bowed over his sewing, seemed to care not.

He had started to grow a beard. Marjorie thought it suited him a little better than the clean-shaven look with which they had crept through Paloma some weeks earlier.

She said, as casually as she could, which wasn't very, "Cor's a small girl."

Thiago made a quiet noise of agreement, but did not look up.

"Small target," Marjorie continued. "Hard to focus on the centre of mass there, _si sabes a lo que me refiero_."

"_Pienso lo mismo que tú_." He did not waver, did not look up, did not even change his tone of voice as he said, "Something like Corvina Rouen, you do not shoot."

_No_, Marjorie thought, _you lock her up under the ground and you kidnap her family. Clearly_. _Obviously that is the sane response here._

"Something like Corvina Rouen," Thiago continued, his voice almost lazy as he turned the garment in his hands and inspected the sleeve seam on the left side. His movements were languid and casual. "You do not strike with intent to kill."

Here was the one bit Marjorie could do fluidly, jerking the charging handle free and then removing the bolt carrier, not quite in the same motion but nearly. She focused on that now, knowing that Thiago would speak when he felt he needed to.

"Something like Corvina Rouen." He glanced up at her. Marjorie remembered thinking before that he might just favour her because they were both Mexican, but there was something else there. Sometimes being with Thiago was less like accompanying her commanding officer, and more like spending time with her shadow – not her shadow as she was, but the shadow of the person she was about to become. Other times, she thought she just wasn't getting enough sleep if that was the best comparison she could come up with. "You must cripple before you kill."

Marjorie said, "like hunting elk."

"Something like that." Thiago seemed pleased with his handiwork. He stood. "Cut the head off a hydra, and two grow back. So you do not go for the head. You go for the limbs."

Marjorie frowned. "Locking her up?"

"That was step one."

"And step two?" Marjorie thought for a moment. Those letters. She thought of what Thiago had said to Bernard Givre – _we intercepted one of the messages moving north from the Selection_. She had wondered for a long while what that might have meant, and thought she might be on the cusp of finding out. "You fed them misinformation?"

"Lissa Dove sent a letter shortly before she went missing."

"We intercepted it," Marjorie said, "we intercepted letters from Lissa Dove and from..."

It was starting to make sense. Slowly, but starting.

"We caught them, we changed them, we set Ekaitza Jones on her path..."

"And this," Marjorie said, with some scepticism, "has something to do with Gildas, doesn't it?"

"Gildas has been... regrouping in the dark for a while now."

"I thought you said we couldn't open up a war on two fronts. We couldn't contend with him, not with the breakthrough into Fennley."

"Correct."

"And we don't have the resources to contend with Pandora. We are stretched too thin. So..."

Thiago shrugged his coat on. "So we cripple it. Cripple them."

"Take out one leader," Marjorie said slowly, "and encourage the other to make their move?"

"Keep Pandora staggering long enough that whatever remained of the Gildas organisation would get cocky."

"You..." Marjorie shook her head. "It sounds like you set this up so that Cor and Artur would go after each other."

"Whatever remains of whatever's left," Thiago said. "Can be dealt with… at the end of all of this." He paused, tugging at a stray thread at one cuff. "But that will not be my duty."

Marjorie cocked her eyebrow. "Retirement so soon, old man?" She didn't think Thiago could be much older than thirty, but the tiredness around his eyes and the weather-worn quality to his skin made it hard to gauge exactly how old he was. He could have been fifty, truth be told.

"_Si la cosa en mi cabeza tiena algo que decir al respecto_. If the thing growing in my head has anything to say about it." Thiago caught sight of the expression on Marjorie's face at this pronouncement, and smiled. If it was anyone else, Marjorie would have thought it seemed a little fond. "You had to have guessed. You're a smart girl. I thought you would have realised Demetri assigned you to me for a reason, Jori."

"I didn't think…" She had thought she was an aide-de-camp, a secretary, a glorified personal assistant. Not a… what was he saying here? She was to be his _replacement_?

As though he could read her mind – "not yet. I have a few years left." With a flick of his wrist, he adjusted his cuffs so that the scars on his wrists, the legacy of some Crown torture, were obscured. "And you're not ready yet."

Marjorie was a curious girl, and although she could usually keep that curiosity contained, there came the occasional moment when she could not hold back a question. "When will I be ready?"

Thiago considered this for a moment. "I suppose," he said, "when you steal a secret from me."

"Any secret?"

"Preferably," he said, "the secret this kingdom was founded on."

* * *

True to what Vardi Tayna had mentioned that morning, the next component of the Layeni town festival was indeed a picnic – at least, a picnic in that quintessentially rebel style, where it was apparent to Liz that the entire thing had been pulled together with very few resources and plenty of creativity. As Saran had said the previous night, there was so much about these events that should have seemed tacky, but for the earnestness in which these festivities were all mired – it did remind Liz, at least a little bit, of farm life in Midston, where you had to enjoy the little pleasures in life while you had them and care not a bit about other people's opinions.

And it was, she thought, rather pretty. They were standing on the green space which fretted the space between two streets, squeezed into what little free space the tiny town could afford to sacrifice to leisure and luxury, along which the river ran in a tiny tributary like a guitar string. There was a small, slightly greying collie dog charging in and out of the water, looking delighted with himself as he splashed those sitting closest to the banks. It looked like one of the sheepdogs that Liz had grown up with on her grandparents' farm, maybe a little smaller and a little more twitchy.

There were baskets dripping from the trees, where the previous night there had once been fairy lights, and patterned blankets in every colour, frayed and worn and gaudy, were spread across every spare patch of grass. There were speakers lining the balconies of the nearest apartment, balanced precariously atop wicker chairs and coffee tables, strewn over with flowers and sheets to make them look pretty. There was confetti stuck between the cobblestones here, some bright powder staining the pavement yellow and orange, some glitter still clinging to the walls of the neighbouring shops. Wick had pointed it out to them on their way to the green: someone must have got married recently.

Liz supposed it must be a romantic time to do just that. She wished the couple well, whoever they were. You needed all the luck you could get in this world, and Liz tried not to be bitter about the path her life had taken – if others could avoid her sorrows, then all the better.

Her hangover had mostly dissipated; she wasn't quite sure whether to credit this to Vardi Tayna's alcoholic cure earlier in the morning, or some effect of the crisp morning air. There was some scent on the breeze she couldn't name, vaguely smoky and vaguely floral, like someone somewhere was grilling roses; it was pleasant, and it was enough to guide them across the park to where the other Selected were waiting. Yue was still wearing her _yukata _from the night before, but Saran had changed into a less formal sundress, navy in colour and patterned with tiny crescent moons. Liz hadn't been sure how casually they should attire themselves for this event, and had tried to split the difference with a pair of shorts borrowed from Agares and a lacy green top from the market – a gift, Raphael had said, but would not say from whom it had come. She was glad that the sun had made a spectacularly bright appearance today, and that the air was relatively warm and still despite the chill and ice of the previous days.

Saran waved them over with big arm movements, smiling, and Eden said, glancing between the northerners and Liz, "how are you three not _freezing_?"

"They make them tough in Midston," Liz said with a shrug, and Saran laughed.

They sat together, the tight bunch of Selected, and Liz realised how few their number had become –the northerners, Yue and Saran; the new converts, Eden and Liara; those more familiar with the rebels, Vardi Tayna and Liz.

Just six. Nearly there. Was Liz going to win a competition she had entered only to get a chance to see the rebellion?

How could she, when she had only had a single conversation with the man at the heart of it?

And speak of the devil, for there he was – Demetri, winding his way languidly down through the throngs of people, dressed much as he had been the last evening, in a long-sleeved t-shirt and jeans, looking like any other young man at the festival. He had long legs. Liz wasn't sure why she hadn't noticed that before. Barefoot as well, which surprised her, although she couldn't quite say why. Looking around now, she could see that indeed most people were – it was clearly just the Layeni style. Several of the girls were now wearing the previous night's _ai-katean _as an anklet, and had clearly chosen their dresses to try and match the colours thereof. Liz rather wished she had thought of that, though she suspected such a gesture would make it seem as though Demetri's gift had meant more to her than it had.

Purple mallow, she had known the flowers by sight. Pretty. She wondered if he understood what the flowers had meant – mallow, her grandmother had always said, meant quite simply _consumed by love_. She wasn't sure she understood how he could possibly direct that towards her; she wasn't sure whether he meant it about himself. She didn't know enough about his relationships with these other Selected girls to say for sure – if indeed he have any, because Saran had mentioned that she had never really had a one-on-one interaction with the young king, and Liz suspected that the Mongolian girl was not alone in that.

He came down and smiled to see them. Liz thought it almost looked genuine, and it was clear that Yue clearly perceived it to be, given the wattage with which the girl from Whites returned the expression. Eden said, in rather measured tones, "good morning, your Majesty," and Saran inclined her head.

For her part, Liara just sort of… looked.

"Good morning, your Majesty," Liz echoed distantly at the same time as Vardi Tayna, glad that she would not stand up. His gaze roved across them, and she was struck again at how empty he could seem at times, like if he was not called upon to play his role he might just sit in an empty room and stare forward. Was that an unkind thought? She wasn't quite sure that she cared.

"Good morning, ladies." His voice was ever so slightly hoarse. A touch of humanity, Liz thought, as though he had been shouting or crying or sleeping poorly. "I hope you enjoyed last night."

"But not too much." Wickanninish Harjo, the man Saran called Wick, usually with a fond smile, was behind him, strong arms bare. Liz had always thought he looked like a man accustomed to hard work, and the callouses on his hands as he spread them now seemed to confirm her suspicions. "Well." He shrugged. His hair had grown out in the weeks of the Selection – Liz remembered seeing his image on the Illeán Report, with long hair and a softer face, before his cheekbones had sharpened, and remembered being surprised to see that he wore his hair short when she arrived at the safehouse. It touched his shoulders now, but he didn't seem concerned about it. It made him look slightly wilder. The rumours went that the General had saved him from death row as a teenager, and recruited him to the rebellion. Such an act summed up Liz's conflict about the rebellion: had it been an act of kindness or pragmatism? Salvation, or preying on a young man with no other options? "As long as you didn't get caught, I imagine it's all fair in love and war."

He was looking at Vardi Tayna. She was looking back, rather blithely.

"Don't listen to him," Demetri said, "he doesn't represent me."

He lowered himself down onto the ground on a spot between Liz and Saran, and Wick stood opposite, beside Eden and Liara – which seemed for the best, Liz thought, because those two had been acting rather tensely all day. She could imagine why. She might have defected from Crown territory, but she was – she always had been – from a sort of rebel background. Crown enough that her fiance had died for their cause, rebel enough that her mother had died for theirs. One foot in either bloody world. Liara and Eden didn't have those nuances. They were meant to be royalist to the bone.

Wick said, "it's traditional to pick your own berries for breakfast. Would one of you ladies be kind enough to accompany me?" He held his hand out to Yue and the northern girl – with a shy glance in the direction of Demetri and Liz – took it, and stood, and then turned and held her own hand out for Saran. It was, Liz hated to admit, slightly adorable. Eden looked as though she were going to ask Demetri for the same thing, but then there was a call from the other side of the green from a man in an acid yellow waistcoat and hair shorn roughly short as though by force, and she offered Demetri an apologetic look before she went to see what the fuss was about. Liara tipped backwards to lie down in the grass, her hair spread about her like a halo, and the pale light making her look slightly ethereal. She looked so utterly relaxed around her king, and Liz remembered again that they were childhood friends – or, at least, that was how it had always been portrayed. She imagined even that kind of friendship could become strained, slightly, by long separation.

She and Wyatt had been childhood friends as well.

Met at seven, in love at fifteen, engaged at eighteen.

Dead at nineteen, of course, but that was the way these things went.

Vardi Tayna stood and went to the nearest tree to pull the basket down from its boughs. She set it on the blanket between Liz and Liara, and, stretching, said, "I'm going for a swim," to no one in particular.

The little collie dog looked delighted at this pronouncement.

Demetri reached forward and flicked open the basket. Liz could not help but lean forward to peer within – all sorts of fruits, she noted, and bushels of berries, and a checked sheet covered a plate that she thought might have been meats or cheese. "I thought Wick said it was traditional to pick your own fruit?"

There was a tired smile in Demetri's voice. "Wick likes to complicate things."

Liz thought of Saran. "In all senses?"

Demetri sighed. "Apparently."

Liz reached into the basket and pulled out a pomegranate, and then a second, and then a third. "I'm sensing a theme."

"It's their season," he said ruefully, by way of explanation, "a little later than usual this year. Not enough acidity in the soil – we had to ship out sphagnum peat to try and save the harvest before the frost hit."

Liz smiled. "Do you know much about farming, your Majesty?"

For a split second, she imagined he looked almost stung, almost surprised by her scepticism, and then it was gone, vanished and replaced by his usual relaxed placid response: "I try to know a little bit about a lot, Lady Elizabeth. But I'm never afraid to learn a little more."

"That's admirable. I suppose you'll be a real man of the people by the time the capital is won."

Demetri paused. "That is the dream."

"Boring dream."

"What's yours, then?"

Liz couldn't help but smile at the abrupt profundity of this question. "It's early in the morning for such talk, your Majesty."

"I find time rather loses its grip when you're in Layeni."

Indeed. Liz had noticed that. After being in the bunker with Nina and Sol and Opal for so long, the strange way that the days passed here in the village – simultaneously stretching out into forever and also passing in a blur that suggested more time was slipping past than she realised – was hard to adjust to.

"I always wanted to be a midwife," she said, by way of answer. "That seemed… like a good thing to be."

"Very noble."

She glanced at him. "Sarcasm? Really?"

"I'm rarely sarcastic, Lady Elizabeth." He cracked open the pomegranate with his hands; the juice stained his hands, very palely, with pink streaks. "Very rarely."

"I find that hard to believe."

"You seem very cynical."

"Do you think I shouldn't be?"

"I try not to tell people what they should be."

He offered her one half of the fruit. She did not take it from him; instead, she reached out and plucked out two seeds from it, thinking of how their shape had always rather reminded her of a heart.

"What about you?" She bit down on the seed. It was sweet, maybe a little tart, like despite the best efforts of the harvesters, they had not quite reached total ripeness when they were gleaned. "Would you call yourself a cynic, your Majesty?"

He seemed to be considering the question, as he mimicked her motions and helped himself to two of the seeds as well. "I'd like to consider myself a realist…."

"But?"

"I've been reliably informed my vision of reality is far too optimistic."

At first, she was close to laughing, but then she, quite abruptly, recalled their conversation from the night before.

_"I don't think I've ever heard one end happily."_

"_Makes them realistic, don't you think?"_

She wondered what Demetri knew about unhappy endings.

And then Liz turned, and caught sight of the men and women milling about the edge of the square with rifles slung over their shoulders, and remembered where, exactly, she was.

"That sounds," she said, rather quietly, "like a good quality to have these days."

"Yes." He smiled. There was something about that expression – not a smile, more like a grin, less restrained than any expression she had seen him wear during this whole damn travail. It reminded her of boys she had known back in Midston, of the guys that would hang out around playing pick-up basketball in the back lot of the local feed store, of the way Wyatt had smiled at her whenever she came out with a particularly hard or cutting opinion. "I find it comes in handy."

"I'm sure something will dent it," Liz said, "sooner or later."

He was about to reply, when his gaze abruptly flicked to the left, over her shoulder, and all the life that had been in his face – all the personality and _role _– drained in a single instant, as quickly as if a faucet had opened. He did not say anything, only took Liz's hand and gestured that she should stand, and stand she did. Liara, as though alerted by the sudden silence, opened her eyes, and glanced over at them, and stood as well, and looked in the direction that they were looking, and even Liz could tell that they were probably meant to be looking at the man in the suit threading his way through the crowd just as Demetri had a few minutes earlier.

Liz kept her voice very soft. "Do I want to know who that is?"

Demetri squeezed her hand very gently. "My fairy godfather," he said, quite darkly, and nodded at Wick, who had appeared quite silently at his side, as a guard dog might stand at his master's side. Wick put his hand on Liz's shoulder and pulled her behind him, as though he were a shield, as the dark man in the suit approached Demetri with the air of a generous uncle at a family reunion, holding his arms open as though he expected the glowering king to embrace him.

He had, Liz noticed, one golden hand.

"_Vashe velichestvo_," the dark man said, or something that sounded like it. Was that Russian? Liz wasn't sure. "You haven't changed a bit, little one. Where is my boy?"

"He's not yours."

"As much mine as you are." The dark man patted Demetri on the cheek and stepped back, scanning those before him – Wick, Liara slowly stepping away, Uzohola approaching from the back with her hand on her gun. "Quite the entourage. You don't trust your old uncle Artur?"

"We both know the answer to that, I think."

"It's a festival, __gavryusha__. If there's any time for a truce, it's now. Let's sit down, get a few, have a catch up, shall we?" Artur's eyes were still scanning across the group. "I've brought some wine, if that changes anything."

Demetri nodded, his eyes sliding over to Wick.

Artur held up a hand. "Let's keep the girls, shall we? Bit of decoration never goes astray."

"No." Demetri's voice was firm. "I think not."

The dark man _tsk_ed. "Demetri. Selfishness in a king is a dreadful trait."

"I can think of worse."

In front of Liz, Uzohola threw Wick a slightly wild look. Liz didn't need to be a seasoned rebel to know what she was asking: _where are the guards? _Liz didn't know who this Artur guy was, but it was apparent Demetri didn't want him around. So where was his protection when he needed it? Uzohola thumbed off the safety on her gun, and angled her body so that it was not visible to the dark man.

"Indeed." Artur sounded amused. "Naivete, for one."

Out of the corner of her eye, Liz caught sight of Uzohola's twin brother, Uzokuwa, stepping closer as well, and could not help but breathe a sigh of some relief. The field marshal had rather terrified her when she had first encountered him – something about the scar that marred the length of his jaw, still clearly visible despite the thick dark beard he had grown to cover it – but if he was here, the others could not be far behind.

"What are you here for, Gildas?" Liz thought that Wick's voice could have cut glass. He kept one hand on Liz's waist as though he was expecting to need to grab her quickly.

"Simply what is due to me. The way I see it," Artur said calmly. "This whole kingdom of yours was founded on a lie. A lie _I _sold you."

Liz was trying to keep very still, as though that could possibly protect her. Bizarrely, the thought occurred to her that she had never thought of humans as being prey before, but here, under this man's eyes, she could think of herself as little else.

That thought made it very hard to focus on the conversation that was playing out in front of her.

"Charitable interpretation of events." Demetri, cautiously calm.

"If you take one step closer..." Wick, dangerously cold.

"Liz." Liara, hissed under her breath.

"I won't ask again." Demetri, venomous.

"Wait. She didn't tell you?" Artur, honestly surprised.

"_Ubhuti_." Uzohola, barely breathed.

_Ubhuti_. Brother.

Almost on instinct, Liz looked towards Uzokuwa, who had raised his gun...

Raised his gun, and pointed it straight at Demetri.

And then, as though on cue, all hell utterly broke loose.

* * *

"I think he might like you."

Yue smiled and resisted the urge to glance over her shoulder, where she knew Kün was likely to still be looking at her – partially because she wasn't sure what she would do if he was, partially because she wasn't sure what she would do if he wasn't. "I'm starting to think so," she agreed, trying not too sound too arrogant at the admission – she was far from accustomed to people simply… _liking_ her. It felt like she had tricked the people around her into finding her likeable, and like she didn't quite know how she had accomplished such a deception, and at any moment everyone was about to perceive the truth and leave her. "That's… not against the rules, right?"

Raphael smiled. "No," she said, "I don't believe it is."

Yue held up her little container of berries and inhaled deeply, smiling at the sweet and acrid scent that clung to them. "Okay," she said. "I'm trusting you, Rafa."

And she could not help but find it deeply reassuring and comforting that Raphael did not correct her, did not even blink an eye at the use of this affectionate diminutive, but merely said, "as you should, little Yue. When have I ever let you down?"

Yue could not, truth be told, think of a time. Raphael and Agares had been unnervingly kind to her throughout her time at Layeni. She wasn't sure how she would even begin to thank them, once this was all over. She wasn't sure how she could even begin to face the idea of going home again.

Maybe she could ask them to let her stay with them. She could get a job, pay them rent, find some place of her own eventually. Get a cat.

The idea, the mere abstraction of some cozy place of her own, was almost enough, on its own, to make her smile.

"Never," she said softly, and Raphael smiled.

"I aim not to start."

They went down to the river, where the dog – Feste, Cuckoo, Bruce – was splashing about in the water quite contentedly. Yue was gratified and pleasantly surprised all over again that he ran to her as soon as he glimpsed her, even though in doing so he drenched the cotton sleeves of her _yukata _as he rolled about in her arms for a brief moment and then bounced on again to greet Raphael in a similarly exuberant manner. An utter desperation to be loved, Yue thought, which seemed like a very strange quality for a dog that belonged to the Smetiskos, and who must have been mired in so much affection.

"_Tch_, calm down, Koo. You're making a fool of yourself." Raphael scratched the dog's ear, and then, in a fluid motion, pushed him into the river again in a gesture that Yue thought made it quite clear that the blonde woman must have had younger siblings. For his part, the dog seemed quite delighted with this affectionate cruelty, and went into the water with gusto, thrashing about in the water over to a floating remnant of ice where he attempted, once, twice, thrice, to climb up onto it and then slipped back into the water to roll about a little more.

"I think he's a masochist," Yue mused, and Raphael laughed.

"A martyr for love, _aywa._ I can relate."

They sat down on the river bank; a little farther upriver, she could see the Martyr's Needle jutting up awkwardly from the water, and the little concrete platform where she and Demetri had sat for all those hours the previous night, just talking and sometimes not talking at all, just watching the light play across the veins of the ice. The water was moving now, and the whole beautiful tableau was no longer so frozen and perfect and still – it was instead all movement, all rush and motion, like that night had been a single moment in which time had deigned to cease to move, and nature had stilled about them for just that purpose.

They were sitting some distance from the rest of the crowd. Yue liked the other Selected, and she loved the whole Layeni ambiance, but she could not deny that it was a lot of constant noise and company for a girl who was a little more accustomed to being lonely. Maybe someday she would get a little less accustomed to it. God, she hoped that would be the case.

And it was strange, because sitting beside Raphael felt similarly familiar and comfortable – she reminded Yue greatly of the king sometimes, or maybe it was more accurate to say that it often seemed to Yue that Raphael was the kind of person the king was trying to portray, trying to be, trying to become. She was a strong, solid, warm presence beside Yue, even without speaking, and Yue sensed that she could sit here for many long moments without that silence ever seeming awkward or uncomfortable.

She remembered Ekaitza talking about auras. If people had auras, she thought that Raphael and Demetri would have the same one – a deep gold or burnished bronze, something very pure and very warm.

Kün would be something paler, something sweeter. A lilac, maybe, or a pale fawn, like the dust of the land to the south.

"I noticed you were out all night." Raphael_ could_ sit here for many long moments without speaking, but she had clearly chosen not to.

Yue felt a blush creeping up her cheeks. "Oh. Yes. It was… we were just talking."

"You don't need to defend yourself to me."

"I know. But..." Yue could not find words with which to end this sentence, and wound up just falling silent anew and gazing out across the water. "It was nice," she said finally, "but… I'm not sure it'll mean anything. You know. In the bigger picture."

"I'm not sure I do know," Raphael replied, "but as long as you do, that's all that matters."

Yue shrugged and looked down into her little basket of berries.

Raphael said, "I have nothing but good things to say about every girl living in my house. And if I had to put money on it, I'd say that one of you three was going to win. I don't think he would have let any of you meet me unless you were in with an _excellent _chance – let alone live with me for months on end."

Yue still found it strange that so many people found it so ordinary to talk about love in terms of chance and winning. It was anathema to everything she had believed about how the course of romance ought to run. "I do appreciate that, Raphael."

"I am only telling the truth."

"Even so." Yue smiled down at her hands. "Um. Demetri asked me on a date for later today."

She sensed, more than saw, Raphael's smile in answer. "He did? That isn't like him."

"Well. I asked him."

Raphael laughed, reached into her container, and flicked a berry out towards the dog, who nearly flipped over on himself trying to catch it in the water. "Atta girl."

And then, as though there was some entity up in the sky who had determined that all this calm had gone on quite long enough and it was time for the storm, there was, quite abruptly, a loud _crack_ behind them, like the sound of fireworks during Lunar New Year up in Whites.

A single _crack_.

Raphael's whole body appeared to alter in a single instant. Yue hadn't realised how totally a person could change in a moment – every line of Raphael's body abruptly became tense, and any sense of warmth dissipated instantly as she jerked her gaze towards the tree where they had left Demetri and Liara and Tayna and Liz. "Yue." Her voice was low, cool and collected, but a frisson of urgency ran throughout. "Where are the others?"

Yue's thoughts tumbled over each other as though all racing for the door in the same instant. "I… uh…. um." She blinked, hard, and tried to swallow. "I don't..." She shut her eyes. "With Demetri. Except Saran. Saran was with Wick."

"Okay."

"And Eden was with Enyakatho."

"Okay. Good."

Another _crack_, and a scream. Yue couldn't say whose scream. Who was that? Who was screaming?

Raphael jumped to her feet – she did that like Demetri as well, a single fluid movement – and she put her hand on the nape of Yue's neck, on the collar of her _yukata_, and she hauled the younger girl to her feet in a single fluid motion, as easily as a mother cat carries a cat. Yue scrambled to find her feet, and barely had time to do so, because Raphael was pushing her towards the bushes on the edge of the green, and urging her to keep low even as she urged her to move faster, faster.

Another _crack_, and then – like it had been triggered – an outburst of something more recognisable as gunfire from somewhere in the square, and then it wasn't just a single person screaming but six or seven, and then it was sixteen or seventeen, and then it was more than she could possibly hope to count.

And then it was everywhere as the people of Layeni realised that a massacre was underway.

They scattered. There were children here, Yue thought dazedly, little girls in sundresses with scraped knees and little boys with new shirts and berry stains on their collars, parents clutching their hands as they sprinted with the desperation of one who feels the reaper breathing down their neck and knows that with every step something might rip through them…

and kill them.

And kill them.

And kill them.

There was no way to say that nicely. That was all it was. They could die here.

Oh god. At least in the safehouse, the risk had been abstract, something far away, something that was coming. This was here, this was now, this was real and almost tenable.

"Stay close." Raphael's gaze was cold and hard. Yue hadn't realised this woman could look so terrifying, but the hand on her arm was steady and determined, like she expected to die before she would allow Yue to be parted from her. "Down. _Down_. Yue, now!"

Yue collapsed onto the ground and scrambled, feeling tiny twigs and stones dig deep into her palms and legs as she tried to do as Raphael had commanded. There was no way this could protect her, she thought, they were behind a _bush_, that couldn't protect her, a bullet would pass through that like air.

"Okay." Raphael's voice was low. "See the building?"

Yue saw the building.

"Yeah," she said. "Yes. I do."

"When I say run," Raphael said, her voice low. "Run. Okay? Run."

Yue barely had time to gather her breath again before Raphael had her up and sprinting again, fast, and Yue was almost glad to have all of her athletic experience on the ice to propel her across the street now, glad once they were off the grass because there was so much less of a chance of slipping once she was on the concrete and then they were up onto the sidewalk and then they were around the side of the building and Raphael was saying "_down_" and she collapsed, more onto her knees than anything else, and crept close to the wall as Raphael peered around the wall.

Yue bit back a scream as something landed heavily beside her, but it was just one of the Anchorites from the market, recognisable as an Anchorite because of the white lily pinned to his collar, recognisable anew as the eldest brother of the family who ran the fish stall. He worked there four times a week, Yue thought distantly. He had got engaged this week. She remembered seeing him and his fiance on the bridges during the festivities the previous night. She thought his name might have been Rëz.

"Rëz," she said, not quite knowing why.

"Yue," he said, looking slightly dazed. His face was pale under the warm tan of the Wastelands. "Have you seen Kün?"

"Kün?" Yue struggled to think. "I..."

A sound, not a _crack_ but larger than that, a miniature explosion right beside her head, and Yue barely managed to swallow back her scream. Or could she have screamed, even if she wanted to? She wasn't sure her vocal chords would have worked if she tried. She wasn't sure she could muster the air required.

Raphael looked prepared to wrap her arm around Yue's face if the younger girl thought about trying.

There was a volley of fire behind them, a shout, a thud, more gunfire, and then Raphael leapt to her feet and tackled the silhouette that approached from the green, coming around the building as a mere shadow. She tackled low and spun so that the man was knocked of his feet and brought straight down onto the street. She struck him in the face – hard – and scrabbled for his gun, seizing upon it and flinging it away, towards Yue.

Yue could only stare at the thing lying in the dirt, her hands shaking at the thought of picking it up, of using it. She wasn't sure she trusted herself not to shoot herself or Rëz if she did so.

Raphael rallied back and struck again, and it occurred to Yue that she was probably going to kill him. Raphael Smetisko was going to kill this man with her bare hands. Yue knew this, with the same utter conviction with which she knew her own name. And it was only the shout of the man under her that seemed to still the woman from hitting a third time.

"Fuck, Rafa! It's me!"

"And?" It was a snarl, like a wild sound ripped from her throat.

Wickanninish Harjo had blood on his hands, blood on his shirt. "_Fuck_, Rafa, I'm not… I had nothing to do with this!"

"_Yue_. Put a gun on him."

Yue stared. "On…"

"Now."

The word was cold and final.

She scrambled for the gun – it was a handgun, she noticed absently, a small gun, like one you could conceal under your jacket – and picked it up. It was… it was so much heavier than she had ever thought a gun could be. Her wrist ached just raising it. Her hand shook trying to point it. She didn't even dare put her finger anywhere near the trigger, for fear some muscle might spasm. She could only point it in the direction of Wick and Raphael, so violently did her arms shudder when she attempted to point it true.

Raphael staggered back onto her feet, every muscle in her body alive like an electric wire. Wick wiped the blood from his face, and lurched back up, clearly unsteady. Yue stared.

What was happening? Whose blood was he wearing? Where was Saran?

Where was Saran? Where were the others? Where was Demetri?

Raphael held her hand out for the gun, and with some relief, Yue handed it over to her. She took it in a single hand, and aimed it on Wick with the perfect precision and stillness of an expert. "Harjo."

"Rafa. If I knew, I'd tell you." Wick spoke in low, clipped, urgent tones. "Gildas was here. Uzokuwa turned on us. There's… I don't know who we can trust but you can trust me."

"Uzokuwa?" Her voice sounded somewhat hollow.

"Uzokuwa?" Yue echoed.

"I was sent to find Yue." Wick's eyes darted back and forth. "They're evacuating the Selection."

"And I'm meant to trust that?"

More gunfire from the square. More screams.

"Yes," Wick said softly. "You're meant to trust _me_."

"You're my brother's friend, Harjo. Not mine."

"Then, please. Even if you don't trust me. Trust him"

Yue said, very softly, "I trust him."

After all, it was _Wick. _For Yue, in that moment, it was as simple as that. It was utterly elementary. Maybe she would be wrong, but if she was wrong about this, there was no way she would be right about anything else.

Raphael turned to look at her. There was something in her eyes, some deep sorrow, verging on a grief that had, perhaps, not yet found its reason for being. "Yue..."

"I do." Yue, shakily, took a step forward. Raphael put out an arm as though to stop her; Yue very gently put her hands on the other woman's sleeve and lowered it, and jerked in an involuntary spasm of terror as an explosion seemed to rock the entire square. "I do trust him."

"Yue. I'm meant to keep you safe."

"You've done that. You saved me. Please." Yue looked back at Rëz. "I'll go with Wick but can you please..."

"I'll stay with him," Raphael said, automatically, without needing to think about it. "You can stay too..."

"I know. I know."

Wick held out his hand, and Yue took it. She felt all the resistance go out of Raphael in that single instant. Wick pulled Yue close, and the two of them stepped around the cinder blocks in the alley, and Yue shuddered all over again to hear that a silence seemed to have descended upon the town square.

Somehow, that was so much worse than the screams.

"Rafa? Please?"

Raphael turned to look at her. That cold anger that had filled her eyes only moments earlier had dissipated utterly. She was the same kind woman that Yue had known for all these long weeks.

"Can you look after Kün for me? If you find him?"

"I'll find him." Raphael set her jaw. "If you're going, then you need to go now. Yue. Please stay safe."

"Of course."

"I'll see you in Angeles." The traditional rebel goodbye, insofar as they ever said goodbye. There was no time for hugs or goodbyes, no time for thank yous or nostalgia. Wick took Yue's hand, and they ran. They ran until Yue's lungs were burning.

And by the time that Yue was able to turn back and look towards Raphael and Rëz, Uzokuwa's men had reached them and there was blood everywhere.

* * *

Right up until this moment, Eden had not known that Layeni extended as far downwards as it did above the ground. It wasn't until Enyakatho Imfazwe had heaved back the manhole cover on the street between the bakery and orphanage and urged her to climb down into the tunnels beneath that Eden was aware of just how comprehensively the rebellion seemed to have prepared for the worst – and, it seemed, the worst had come.

The worst, or something like it.

Enyakatho threw her something – she caught it in two outstretched hands, and fumbled with it for a single moment. A pen light. She hit the button, and a thin beam of light illuminated the brick wall on the far side of the tunnel. It was mostly dry, but freezing cold; she was already shivering, but she could not quite say for sure that such chill was not due to the sudden terror of realising that she had come to the rebellion and now she was seeing the war.

This was what she had come here for.

"Enya." She did not dare speak louder than a hiss. "Are you coming with?"

"He did not answer, only whispered, "_go east_" and slid the cover back over the tiny hole of sky. And then Eden was left in the dark, in the cold, on her own.

Better than being with other people right now.

But the abrupt isolation nonetheless frightened her. Not alone the idea of being alone here, so far under the ground, but the idea of being separated from the others, of not knowing what was passing above ground. All of the others could be scattered. All of the others could have turned on one another. All of the others could be dead.

For someone who loved to be in control of her own story, Eden was feeling very out of control right now.

She turned, and her penlight bounced awkwardly across the walls and the hewn dirt of the floors. Nina would have been in her element here. Nina would not have felt the walls closing in upon her as she began to walk in a direction she thought likely to be east. Nina would have known how to move without making so much _noise_, without her legs shaking, without feeling as though she might not make it to the end of the corridor before something awful came after her from behind.

The path sloped, jerked right and then spiralled left, came up to a fork and Eden, haltingly, chose the direction she hoped was east. East was away from the river, she thought, east was towards the hills, and she scanned the roof of the tunnels for any sign of damp or moisture that might suggest that there was running water above, any sign of a change in rocks that might indicate she was heading towards the mountains, anything at all that suggested she was not going to get utterly lost down here.

There was such utter silence, she could almost hear her own heartbeat.

She had seen so little of what had occurred above the ground. Only seen citizens scattering, and hearing shouting, and watched Atiena sprint across the square towards where Eden had left Demetri and Liz to their conversation. Enyakatho had spirited her away before she could see anything else. Before she could become a target.

Had that been out of a sense of duty, or had there been some trace of affection in the urgency with which he had rushed Eden away? Had her concerted efforts to ingratiate herself with the rebellion profited, even a tiny bit, saved her life?

_Ratas serán exterminadas._

She thought of all the threats that had been made against her, and thought of the sight of rebels turning on each other in the square, and realised that there was any number of people who had probably been trying to hunt her down to exact their promised retribution for the crimes of her mother.

_Colaboracionistas serán ahorcados._

She had saved her own skin. Her instincts had been correct, all those months ago. She needed to trust her instincts again now. Could she? It went against all of her practical, pragmatic tendencies to do so. It was anathema to all that she was.

_Traidores serán devorados._

There were no footsteps, no light, and no indication that there was anyone behind her until there was a voice in her ear and a hand over her mouth. "Don't scream."

She couldn't have if she wanted to, but the thought occurred to her to bite down, to rip skin and flesh, and sprint while she could – but she was in the dark, and she wasn't sure she trusted herself to make it to the next turn before this stranger had produced their gun. She grimaced against their hand instead and raised her hands to show she had no intention of making things worse for herself.

She would wait a moment. See what the story was. Run if she needed to.

She wouldn't need to. It was the rebel girl, Atiena. As soon as Atiena seemed satisfied that Eden wasn't going to scream and betray their position, she released her and stepped back, not even blinking as the Lahela girl turned the light on her Morris companion to make sure that she was still herself. The rebel from Tammins had a gun on her back, and a hand wrapped in gauze, and a long open wound running across her face, with a red swelling under one eye. If Eden's nerves had been any less steeled, she might have screamed anyway. Atiena looked like a walking corpse.

Eden said, "Enyakatho told me to go east."

Atiena said, "this isn't east."

Atiena indicated a passageway to the left that Eden had not seen, would never have had any hope of seeing, for it was set at about shoulder-height in the wall. With the other girl's help, she was able to climb up into it, and she followed shortly.

And they kept walking.

Eden and Atiena had spent very little time together, but Eden rather thought there was something about the Tammins rebel that she had always found rather likeable. She had always thought that they could have been friends, in a different world where they had not been raised on different sides of a minefield, where the war was nothing but fiction. Maybe it was something about the survivalist vibe that clung to Atiena Morris like a scent; Eden had been called paranoid a fair few times herself. She could relate. There was something almost alive about the silence that had descended upon them, like they were both utterly and totally aware of everything around them, waiting for the sky to drop down upon their heads, expecting a volley of gunfire to open up behind them and drop _them _down in a single instant.

Nothing happened. They kept going.

Above them, she thought she could hear footsteps. She stopped, and Atiena stopped with her.

Atiena held out her hand, and without protesting, Eden handed over the flashlight. The rebel girl clicked it in a pattern that flared staccato against the far wall – not morse code, Eden thought, because she understood a little of that and this would have been absolute gibberish in morse. Three short, one tiny flash too short to be called short, and two long. There was a long pause, and then, against the same wall – there must have been another corridor running parallel to them – was flashed an answer, a rapid burst of too many long and short for Eden to accurately count.

Atiena slung her gun into her hands. "It's Wick."

They moved forward, and found that it was. Wick and Yue, standing beside a ladder that seemed to lead upwards, back to the real world, back to the fight. Yue looked pale, dirty, but unharmed; Wick already had a black eye blossoming, a shiny purple mark showing up on one cheekbone, blood on his shirt.

There were no greetings; this was not the time for that. Wick gestured that Yue and Eden should start to climb the ladder and said, "if I'm not back in ten, leave without me."

Yue shook her head, and Eden answered before Atiena did. "That sounds like a terrible idea."

"Saran Altai is still unaccounted for." Wick's voice was utterly calm. "Atiena. If I'm not back..."

"Leave." Atiena shook her head. "Fifteen minutes. I'll pass on the message, but..."

"I'll be back. Look after them."

"Of course. I'll see you in Angeles."

Wick was gone before Eden could protest a second time. She didn't think she could have. She didn't think she _would _have. Saran… Saran was a good person. Now that Eden was safe, or approaching safety… it was good that someone was going back to save Saran.

For the first time in a long time, Eden found herself wishing that she was capable of saving people. Instead she was standing here, in a dark, damp tunnel, in a dirty sundress, hoping that an executioner would keep her safe long enough to betray her family.

To save her family. She had to remind herself of that. This was all… this was all for a purpose. That purpose was good.

God, she hoped Wick could find Saran.

Yue climbed first, and Atiena gestured that Eden should climb second. There was a wire grate over the passage at the top, but once they climbed through and out into the fresh air, Eden found that they were in the mountains, as she had suspected they would be – or at least, at their base, nestled among the gentle hills and juglan thickets that marked the first gentle ascents into the sierra.

And there was, Eden was surprised to see, a plane. Not a particularly sophisticated one – small enough, like a miniature version of the 737 that her mother sometimes took between Angeles and Fennley when she wasn't bothered to commute through the traffic at the weekends, but with a heavier, heftier appearance as though armoured. Maybe it was. She imagined that seemed a sensible precaution.

Uzohola was standing by the open door by the empennage of the plane, looking as rattled as Eden had ever seen her. She had remained calm all the way throughout the air strike on the safehouse; she had seemed laconic about every rebel setback reported from the frontlines; she had laughed about every single story of danger and daring that the Inner Circle had let slip over the previous night.

But now… now she looked uncertain. And Atiena looked angry. And Wick had looked scared. And that was enough to make Eden's bones lock up, and have her scan about her surroundings for exit options.

Uzohola said, "where's Wick?" and Atiena seemed not to hear the question as she guided Yue and Eden over to the loading bay and indicated that they should board the plane.

Board a plane?

They were running.

"Atiena."

"He's gone back. Where are the others?"

"With Demetri," Uzohola said tersely. "On the plane. What about..."

It had been maybe four minutes, Eden thought, four minutes since Wick had left.

Liz and Liara were indeed already on the plane, whose innards appeared to have been totally gutted – there were coats on the ground for them to sit on, but no chairs, no tables, no screens but for a single LED display set into the door to the cockpit displaying, in large symbols that she could not read:**የሰሃራ ፌዴሬሽን**. A Saharan language, Eden thought.

Liz looked relieved to see them. She was uninjured as well, Eden thought, and it seemed unfair to the rebellion to be surprised as well as relieved at the idea that none of the girls seemed to have come to any serious harm over the course of the last terrifying hour, but those were nonetheless the emotions that rushed through her as she collapsed down next to Liara and said, "the others?"

Liara just shook her head. "Your guess is as good as mine," she said, quite simply, and quite darkly, and Eden felt her heart sink a little. Across from her, Yue had curled up into herself a little; Liz was staring straight ahead, with the expression of one who had expected the worst and was decidedly unhappy to have been proven right.

* * *

Saran had never liked the idea of violence. Her siblings had always called her the peacemaker, for the simple reason that she had done her best to move through life as a perpetually pacifistic idealist. When it boiled down to it, the simple fact was that Saran did not like to see other people getting hurt.

And people were getting hurt all around her now.

"It's okay," she whispered. What was the name of this child with her, the war orphan she had pulled from the street and into her hiding spot in the Layeni library? She thought she had a good chance of guessing correctly if she called him either Wick or Demetri. "It's okay."

The little boy turned his eyes on her. Blue, she thought. Not many people had blue eyes in the Wasteland. This was Iuitl, she thought. She remembered him. His mother had been a sniper under Thiago Wesick in St Georges. His father had taken his own life shortly afterwards, when the hunger became too much. There were a thousand little boys like Iuitl in the Kingdom in Exile.

If the Crown got their way, there would be a thousand times thousand.

"It's okay," she said, and heard the lie weigh heavy in her own words.

As though to prove her a liar, the doors of the library shuddered under the weight of some explosion, and with two tiny _cracks_, bullets spiralled in through the glass and embedded themselves into the wood of the shelf beside the reception desk. From under the desk, Saran could feel Iuitl's bones shuddering as though trying to shake themselves free of his skin.

But he stayed quiet. Was it because he trusted Saran to keep him safe? She could have cried. She didn't know how to keep anyone safe. They were going to die here.

"It's okay," she said, and this time he echoed it back to her, very softly, as though he was afraid that they would be heard. _It's okay._

And maybe that was the secret, maybe that was all the universe had been waiting for to slot the final pieces into place, for he was just finished whispering it in that thin, reedy voice of his (_it's okay_) when the door at the back of the library slammed open with an urgency – Saran jumped, nearly smacked her head off the top of the desk, and clutched Iuitl close as though she could possibly hope to protect him as she craned her neck to try and see which particular rebel had entered, if they ought to say a prayer of thanks or a prayer for mercy.

Neither. The word escaped her in a single breath: "Wick."

For that was, indeed, the man who had entered the building. He crossed the floor, quickly, and knelt down beside her. "Saran." He did not bother with the title of _lady_. He rarely did any more. There was too much urgency in his voice. "Are you okay?"

She nodded, slightly dazedly. He had blood on his shirt, and on his face. She thought he might have broken his nose; it didn't look right, looked swollen at the bridge, just as there was a swelling on his cheekbone. He had blood on his hands as well. Saran wasn't sure if it was his. And yet his voice was steady and his warm brown gaze was still and kind. Just as it always was.

"And Iuitl?"

"It's okay." His voice was small.

"Good." Wick gave her a small smile, one which seemed strained and uncertain and_ real_ compared to the broader, brighter expression he offered to the little boy. "You two picked a great hiding spot. Well done. You're holding up fantastically, Iuitl."

The little boy nodded. Without thinking, Saran reached out and put a hand on Wick's. "What's going on?"

"Nothing good." He turned his hand over so that his palm faced up; rather than intertwining fingers, he and Saran gripped each other's wrists, a gesture which had struck Saran as slightly less traitorous than the alternative the first time that they had exchanged it but which struck her as slightly more criminal each and every time. "Don't worry, okay? I'm going to get you out of here. We'll make it out."

"To where?"

Wick hesitated. Saran saw his gaze flicker down to his watch, and a darker expression flit across his face. "Somewhere safer," he said, and that told Saran that he wasn't entirely sure either.

_Somewhere_ _safer_. What did that mean for the fate of the others? Where were Yue, Demetri, the rest of the Selected? Were they safe?

Would Saran be?

She nodded hesitantly. With some hesitation of his own, Wick slid in to sit beside her, his body positioned between her and Iuitl, and the doors of the library. She leaned back against one of his arms, just the sensation of some other person, some stronger person, some protector, serving as a decent tonic for the speed at which her heart had been going for the past hour or so. She shut her eyes, and struggled to control her breathing. Wick did not seem inclined to make a run for it right now. She wondered how long they would stay here. Had he meant what he had said about a good hiding place?

Were they just going to wait for the coast to be clear?

As it turned out, that was very much what they were going to do, for the minutes slipped by, and then the hours slipped by, and soon Saran wasn't quite sure how long they had been hiding.

And yet, the coast did not grow clear. Even once the screams had stopped and the chaos had stilled, there was the occasional sudden burst of gunfire, every so often a shout or a yell that suggested someone had been found or someone had tried to run. And each time, Wick grimaced and looked at Saran, and then looked away, as though he could not bear to meet her gaze for too long.

And then, just as the shadows in the library were beginning to grow long and wind themselves around Saran's limbs, there was a very abrupt crash at the front of the building that suggested the doors had been knocked in by a vehicle or a battering ram. Saran could not have jumped this time, even if she had wanted to, so tight Wick's grip upon her wrist.

"Oh, good."

At the sound of the familiar voice, Saran and Wick exchanged a look and he loosened his hold so that she could move forward slowly and stand, for regardless of whether these new arrivals meant well, it was very doubtful that Saran and Wick and Iuitl would make it very far.

"Good?" Saran echoed.

"Good." Devery Atiqtalaaq's silhouette was a solid shape, black and strong, against the rising red light filling the square behind her. Behind her ranged a number of soldiers, tall and strong men and women looking as though they had crawled through hell just to reach the doors of the village library – their faces torn, their skins bruised, their flesh swollen and bruised. In this light, their faces looked like slabs of minced meat. And yet, at the head of them all, Devery's hair was still in two perfect braids, with only a few hairs wisping free to frame a grim face, whose severity was alleviated only slightly when her eyes fell upon the motley trio of survivors and she cracked a slight, needle-like smile. "Lady Saran. There you are."

"Here I am."

"We had feared the worst." Devery gestured to her soldiers to fall back, as though she had only just realised how threatening they might appear in the encroaching gloom of the night. "Thank god we found you."

Saran's mouth was still dry. She was struggling to put words together. "You were looking for me?"

"Of course." Devery Atiqtalaaq shrugged, and the words that followed sounded very pointed indeed. "The north leaves no man behind."

* * *

Fifteen minutes had passed. Wick was not back. It was time to go.

Liara could see this fact etched onto Demetri's face. It was time to go. He seemed to set his shoulders, as though facing headfirst into a bracing wind, at this realisation. He turned to nod at Uzohola, and the woman seemed to have to catch her breath before she returned the gesture and went up, into the plane and into the cockpit.

It was time to go.

Liz's face was pale as the plane started up with a roar and began to shudder its way into motion. "Who's flying this thing?"

"Are we sure they're friendly?" Eden's expression was as dark as Liara had ever seen it.

Liara did not have an answer for that. She wasn't sure how they could be all that sure about anything anymore. She could only stare at Demetri's back as he watched the mountains, and the burning town below, and waited, waited for people who were not coming back.

She ached to go to him, to tell him that everything was going to be alright and the others were going to make it back. But more than that, so much more than that, she wanted to be _right_.

"Time to go," Demetri murmured, and turned.

Turned, just as Liara shouted, _"Täj_!"

And it _was_ Täj, stumbling not through the tiny grate which marked the hidden entrance to the secret Layeni tunnels, but through the thicket of trees at the far edge of the clearing. And if Atiena looked like a living corpse, Täj looked like one that wasn't even living anymore – just conveyed about as though on the end of some far away master's string.

His face was very pale, even paler than usual, with a thin trickle of blood running from his temple, like that was all that was left. He went to take a step up into the plane, and stumbled, and it was only Demetri surging to catch his old friend by torso that prevented him from collapsing there and then.

As though on cue, the engine beneath them roared with a deep, profound sound and Liz was nearly knocked off her feet as the plane was forced into a fast, desperate acceleration along what little runway the clearing allowed. The aft door was still open, as Demetri struggled to carry Täj back from the edge, and for a split second Liara could only stare at the ground beneath them as it was abruptly yanked away from them and the whole craft lurched upwards, into the air, and banked right almost immediately to avoid clipping the edge of the nearest mountain cliff.

Täj slid down against the wall to sit, staring forward slightly dazedly. Demetri grasped his friend's face in his hands, as though checking for a head injury, but even Liara could tell that the pale man was likely concussed. His pale eyes could not even focus without difficulty. They fixed on Liara now, very briefly, as the pale man said, "Tayna," and for a split second Liara's heart constricted, thinking he was far enough gone to mistake the two of them. The moment passed, and then he said, "did you see where…"

Liara could only shake her head.

She did not mean _no, I did not see_. She meant _no, I cannot possibly tell you. No, I cannot find those words. No, this is not my role. _

"Demetri."

Demetri made no sign of having heard his friend, but Täj persisted nonetheless. It struck Liara's hard like a missile, settling deep amongst her arteries, to realise how close his words came to a plea. And he was trying to get to his feet, trying to find his feet, trying to ground himself despite the throw-and-rattle of the flight.

"Demetri, we have to go back. We have to go get her."

The plane lurched again, with a rattle that suggested its shell might come apart at the seams if the mood struck them. Yue's knuckles had gone white, so tightly had she wrapped her grip around the lone metal bar attached to the ground, and so intently was she trying to stop her teeth from chattering with the violent spasming of the craft. Atiena had scrambled for the back door to try and find a way to shut it, as the rivers below shrunk into tiny silver threads and the smoke below became nothing more than a mere wisp of grey on the horizon.

"If she's dead, she's dead." Liara couldn't believe her Demetri could sound so cold. "If she's alive... Täj. As long as she's breathing, she'll find her way out. You know what she's like."

Liara thought: Did he know he was lying? Was he lying? Did he care?

Liara hadn't realise Täj could display such open emotion on his face, his jaw clenched, a naked desperation in his eyes. In their previous conversations, she had mistaken his demeanour for emotional honesty, but she could see now that even then, he had been holding something back. "Ga..."

"You got the shit kicked out of you, Täj." Demetri set a hand on his friend's shoulder. "Listen to me. We didn't go back for the General. We didn't go back for Herry. We've never gone back. The Kingdom is larger than one soldier. You know that I love Tayna..."

Täj shook off his hand.

"I do," Demetri said, dropping his voice low. "You don't have a monopoly on loving her. If she's alive, she's alive. If she's dead, I'll mourn her as much as you will. But either way, what's done is done."

Täj looked at Demetri and for a split second Liara thought the pale man was about to strike his king, actually hit Demetri in the face.

The moment passed. Täj stepped back. Demetri held out a hand to his old friend and Täj turned his back on him and walked away, down the body of the plane towards the tail.

Demetri watched him go, and then, as though suddenly becoming aware of the eyes of the Selected upon him, turned and walked towards the cockpit. After a single moment, Uzohola emerged and walked to sit beside Eden, looking as though she were about to keel over. And keel over she did, despite the rough turbulence that made Eden's knees nearly bounce into and break her jaw, pressing her head against the metal floor, shutting her eyes and going utterly still.

Liara wasn't sure she could blame her for this reaction, after seeing what her twin brother had done in the town square. And looking down towards the other end of the plane, she wasn't sure she could blame Täj for his, although it unnerved her to see such a transformation come over the pale man, who was usually so self-composed.

She was not sure her company would be appreciated, but she went to him anyway. She did not think he would want her to speak, but as she came closer to him, those pale green eyes moved over her and he said, in that deep, warm voice of his, sounding slightly scratchy and hoarse as though holding back something much more primal: "you saw what happened?"

Liara was not sure why her words emerged so strangled, except that the idea of causing this man more pain was, in that moment, utter anathema to her. And yet, the idea of lying to him was similarly unthinkable. "Yes."

It was still playing out as though painted on her eyelids, if she closed her eyes, but in rough and amateurish brushstrokes, like an impressionist idea of bloodshed.

Täj set his head against the wall. "The one time," he said softly. "The one time she should have run away."

All Liara could think to do was reach out, and take his hand.

And to her surprise, he let her.

* * *

That day, the Crown learned of successes and failures alike.

Mordred reclined in the throne that had been his father's, and gestured that Advisor Akiva should advance further into the room. With a hesitant look across the chairs that belonged to the counsellors Mordred had forbidden from attending this meeting, fanned out in a crescent half-moon shape following the curve of the chamber's northern wall, Akiva stepped further into the room. Set moved with him, as though as his shadow.

The Queen Regent usually elected to sit among the counsellors, shoulder-to-shoulder with Mordred's Minister for War and Minister for Intelligence, old men and women with salt and pepper at the temples dressed in neat suits of muted colours. Today, however, she stood to one side of the throne; General Lee stood to the other; neither of them dared move as Mordred spoke.

"Gentlemen." Mordred's voice was languid. "To what do I owe the pleasure?" He paused. "I do hope you're not bringing me any bad news."

"Apparently." A vein jumped in Akiva's vein. "Apparently the mole in the palace let slip the plan. The rebels had ready a fuelled plane from the Saharan Federation."

General Lee turned his eyes on the adviser, very slowly, something dawning behind his dark eyes. "What are you saying?"

"The false king has fled east. Abandoned his people and his supposed kingdom for the safety of a foreign court. Alive."

Mordred's voice was hoarse, his pale eyes distant, watching the mosaic on the far wall of the throne room rather than meeting his advisor's gaze. "And the Selected?"

"Mostly alive. Mostly gone."

"Mostly?" Ysabel could not help herself; she moved forward to put a hand on her husband's arm, and turn imploring eyes upon him. Set had to think of what Mordred had said to his mother all those weeks ago, watching the false Demetri's Selection on the television. __We've fought for peace,while they have fought for power. __That was the only justification that they could cling to, these days. They fought for an end to the fighting. They killed for an end to the killing. They bled for an end to the bleeding.

"Liara Lee is alive." Set's voice was tired. "As are Eden Lahela, Yue Yukimura and Elizabeth Tucker. The others… We are trying to find out."

"Good." Mordred had relaxed his posture only slightly. His voice was slow-dripping venom. "And this mole of theirs?"

Akiva looked to Set for permission to continue, but it was Mordred's uncle who stepped forward to answer the question. "We are doing our utmost, your Majesty. We think we're getting close."

"Fuck getting close," Mordred said narrowly. "Even if there's a spy in our palace, how is that information getting _out_? I was assured, gentlemen, that such a feat was… beyond human capability."

Set had thought the Selection might warm his blood a little, might give him some human interaction, might keep all that gold from weighing out the humanity in his nephew. The coldness in his voice as he spoke now suggested otherwise.

"It appears," Akiva said narrowly. "That the rebels had… assistance." He set his mouth. "From one Artur Gildas."

"I see." Mordred's voice was cold. Akiva and Set exchanged glances.

"It has therefore been suggested," Ysabel said, somewhat softly. "Given Gildas appears to have declared in favour of the rebellion… that we might reach out to one of their rivals..."

"No." Mordred's voice was cold. "I'll have nothing to do with the Acerbi family or the Pandora organisation. We are the legitimate government of Illeá, and we need not associate ourselves with thieves, and whoremongers, and killers."

Thieves and killers, Set thought ruefully, looking at Akiva, and then at his wife, then at his own reflection in the mirror set above the throne. Yes. They would hate to associate with thieves and killers.

"Very well. Find out about the rest of the Selected. If they're alive, and they're still in Illeá, I want them brought to the castle. I want any rebel you find put in chains. And any of the Inner Circle..."

He sighed. For a split second, Set saw him as he was – just a young man. Barely out of boyhood. Hardly a king.

"Bring me their heads," he said finally. "And get me a meeting with Mansa Inkosi Enhle. I'd like to know why the Federation is interfering in an internal matter. What remains of Layeni?"

Akiva was the only one brave enough to speak. "Bones and ash, your Majesty."

Mordred set his mouth and stood. "Very well. You're dismissed."

Another day, Set thought, another massacre. The first time Mordred had ordered someone's death, he had arrived at dinner the next day with the red eyes and pale face of a man who had been crying. Now, he barely even blinked.

God help them all when this was over, Set thought, watching his nephew cross the throne room, and there was no war to distract him. God help them.

* * *

Against his best efforts, once he was alone at the controls of the craft, once he was sure that they were out of the range of any rival attacks, once there was nothing but open ocean beneath them and the smoke of their little kingdom left far behind them, the King of Dust found himself crying.

He was not sure who he was crying for.

The General, the only father he had truly known. Raphael, the only person who had believed that he could actually be a leader and not just look like one. Vardi Tayna, his feral girl, his first friend in the Wastelands. Wick, his most loyal, most unwavering comrade.

And Saran. Nina. Lissa. All those girls, dead or in danger because of him. They were _all _in danger because of him. They always would be. Because of all of this, all of this fighting, this Kingdom and the dust it left in its wake.

What was really the point?


	27. Strangely, There's Nobody

**Chapter 27: Strangely, There's Nobody**

* * *

_And when you go away, I still see you - _  
_The sunlight on your face in my rear view._

_\- _Greg Gonzalez

* * *

Taichi Yukimura had been fond of his proverbs, chanted through gritted teeth like a focusing mantra as though words alone could whet one's focus and sharpen one's resolve, particularly words repeated over and again. They had made for a rather unfriendly companion and a rather unpleasant childhood – though that probably had more to do with the chill in Taichi's voice as he said them, rather than the words themselves. At this point, it had been some four months since Yue had seen her mother's face or heard her father's voice, but the proverbs still came to her mind, rather unbidden, for each new trouble that arose in these new troublesome times.

Right now, as she watched Illéa vanish behind them, the wide tawny spaces of the Wastelands replaced by the vast sparkling expanse of the blue deep, the words that occurred to her were _a__me futte ji katamaru. _

_A__fter the rain, the earth hardens._

She could trace it out on the window in slashes of hard lines and broad swoops of curlicues **– **雨降って地固まる**** – but the shapes ran and blurred even as she scratched them out. Her hands were still shaking. She could still almost feel the weight of the gun in her hand. It had been so much heavier than she had expected it to be. But more than that… the knowledge that the twitch of a finger could have ended a life.

****雨****. Rain. Like dashes of water on a windowpane. She traced it again.

Vardi Tayna had said once that you never forgot your first kill. There was little more visceral than seeing the life drain from a person's eyes, to see them transform in a second from a human being with a live and a mind and a soul to a piece of meat in your arms. Butchering animals couldn't compare, she said. There wasn't the same totality of loss. Your first kill reminded you of how fragile _you _were.

Your first kill.

Was this what the rebellion was? Could you call this a noble cause? Could Yue?

"Yue."

Yue turned her eyes upwards, and found herself smiling automatically, a stretch of lips and squinting of eyes that seemed more instinctive than genuine. Atiena Morris was, to the surprise of the rest of the Selected, in a similar state of dishevelement and shock at what had occurred below in the village, but unlike the others, that surprise had faded rapidly and been replaced by a workmanlike stoicism and straight-forwardness, her mouth maintained in a tight line, her eyes without warmth – or rather, eye, for her right eye was utterly black and filled with blood. Nothing more than burst blood vessels, Liz had said, maybe a concussion, but the effect was stark and startling.

"You doing okay, kid?"

Kid, Yue thought. Atiena was a year older than her. Just a year. A lot could happen in a year. So much could happen in a year.

"You look a little pale."

"I'm fine," Yue said automatically. And she was. Raphael had got her to Wick, and Wick had got her out. No injury. Not even a scrape. And Raphael…. and Rëz…. and Kün? Vardi Tayna? Wick himself, and Saran as well? She was fine, by comparison. She couldn't complain. Not to Atiena, with her bleeding eye, or Liara, with the open wound on her cheekbone, or Liz, who had arrived with her hands covered in blood. Not her own, she had said, and Yue could not understand how she could have said that so very calmly. Farm life, maybe. A lifetime of making meat. "I'm fine."

Atiena crouched. "It's okay if you're not."

"I am. It's fine." Another automatic smile. "Don't worry about me, Atiena. Are you okay?"

She shrugged, but there was something darker in her eyes. "As okay as I can be." She paused. "We got fucked out there, Yue, but… we're fine. We're gonna be good. This is just a setback. Trust me."

Just a setback? Raphael dead and Layeni burning and Uzokuwa a traitor, and who knows else a traitor as well, and all of those people missing and left behind, maybe for good, and this small desperate group fleeing their kingdom, fleeing across the sea. Just a setback? Yue's eyes flicked about the tiny cabin – Liara. Eden. Liz. Täj. Uzohola. That was it. That was all that was left to them. Just a setback?

"I trust you," Yue said, and then, as Atiena prepared to straighten up – "Atiena?"

"Yeah?"

"I..." Her mouth had gone dry. She focused on her hands, tracing out on her fingertips the tiny familiar shapes of her mother's proverbs in the hopes that it would steady her heart – ****井の中の蛙大海を知らず****. Over and again, she made the shapes, as her tongue uncertainly found the sounds. "Earlier today… Rafa wanted me to keep a gun on someone."

****大****. It meant large, but Yue had always thought of it as a somewhat protective symbol. Like a father with his arms stretched wide.

Atiena cocked her head, but said nothing, clearly understanding that Yue was finding her way, rather uncertainly, through the necessary words.

"And it scared me. It was… real. And awful. It scared me."

"Yue..."

"I don't want to be scared anymore, Atiena."

Yue thought, _i__ no naka no kawazu taiki o shirazu. _A frog kept in a well does not know the great sea. The world is so much larger and deeper than she had ever been allowed to glimpse. Even in this Selection, what had she seen? A safehouse that was now dust, a village that was now ash, and from place to place, she had hidden behind others, been pushed here and there.

She had looked back, and Rafa had been blood.

Atiena said, softly, "you are not a soldier, Yue." Her words were without malice, softer than Yue had known the rebel from Tammins was capable of speaking, but there was a profundity lurking beneath, as though she had seen girls follow this path before – and fall.

"I know. I don't want to be. I just..."

Her hands twisted. She wanted to be _useful_.

Atiena said, "physical strength isn't the only kind of strength, you know. The only _useful _kind of strength. But..."

But. Yue looked at her. The older girl was clearly turning something over in her mind, and coming to a conclusion.

"But." Atiena shrugged. "Learning to defend yourself… is never a bad idea. Knowing you can look after yourself if you need to. If you want to learn..."

"You'll teach me?"

"I'll teach all of you." Atiena smiled, briefly. The plane rattled as it hit some pocket of air and jumped abruptly; it nearly shook Yue's bones apart, but Atiena remained still, and calm. "We'll get a class going. All four of you."

Four. Four Selected remaining.

"Atiena. Thank you."

She waved this away, smiling in a pale facsimile of her usual stoically affable attitude. "It'll make my life a little bit easier, trust me."

Yue laughed. "Well," she said, "that alone is motivation."

* * *

It was not until Täj had slipped into sleep that Liara realised she had never seen the pale man asleep, or anything less than fully, totally alert. It was transformative; the years peeled from him. He was younger than Demetri, she thought, or maybe that was just how his sharper features made him seem – she had thought it before, but never seen it so clearly, the marks of an emaciated childhood. In the shrouded gloom of the plane, his face was very pale, his hair was very pale, and she knew that if they were open, his eyes would have been like pale verdigris. She could have traced the line of every bone in his skull.

She wasn't sure why that was what she thought of. There was something delicate about Täj, when he was so still like this, without his paranoid gaze darting about, without the tension he perpetually held in his shoulders and jaw. He reminded Liara a little of Mordred, who could look like that when you caught him unawares – when he was distracted during a meeting, gazing out a window, or lost in thought at an official engagement, toying with his knife like he had forgotten where he was. The same hollow cheekbones, Liara thought, though Mordred had never gone hungry in his life – not for lack of food, that was. Demetri was always called gold, but it was a harvest gold, like light over an autumn gleaning. Mordred was some sort of gold as well, but it had always seemed more like a gold that had not yet ripened, the lightness of the crispest early mornings, the paleness of spring.

She supposed that made Täj winter, though he was a creature of the Wastes and all their arid warmth.

For a split second she had thought that he was going to put his head on her lap, and sleep that way, and the thought of it had put a new tension into her own bones. Instead he had leaned against the wall with a jacket bundled under his head, and shut his eyes, and she had watched him for several long moments, unsure whether he was asleep or trying to stay calm. Certainly, she had wondered how on earth someone could manage to sleep in the rattle and hum of this flight. They must have a good pilot, she thought, for the skeleton of the plane was proving frightfully fracturable, buffeted here and there by the winds over the pacific, which ought not have been so strong but for the fact that they were flying low, lower than they should have, lower than they would have unless they were trying to avoid something, hide from something, escape something.

And yet, Täj seemed not to notice the throw-and-hurl of the air. Maybe it would translate into his dreams.

She wondered what he was dreaming of.

And she wondered why the simple fact that he was sleeping, and vulnerable, and grieving, made her feel so protective of him – the way she had been protective of Mordred during those first long months after Demetri's abduction, when he had refused to eat and tried to leave the palace, day after day, to go find his brother. It had been an instinctive, automatic protectiveness. It brooked no argument.

There was just something so _pitiable_ about them both.

She stood, hesitantly, afraid, quite bizarrely, that the soft sound of her rising would wake him where the roar of the engine and groan of metal had not and, finding that he still slept soundly, went very cautiously to the cockpit. Yue and Atiena were sitting on one side of the plane, Liz and Eden on the other, and Uzohola had spent some hour or so in the lone bathroom on board. Liara wasn't sure if the Saharan woman was crying, or throwing up. Maybe she was, as Atiena had for the first twenty minutes, just staring into space.

She hoped she was okay. Liara wasn't close enough to Uzohola to feel comfortable going to her now, to comfort her, in the wake of her brother's betrayal, but walking past the closed cubicle door... that felt wrong as well. She hoped against hope that someone who knew her better, Täj or Demetri or Atiena, would check on her.

Demetri was doing something similar. Liara stared at the dashboard for a moment – lights, and switches, and buttons, and she didn't have a clue what any of them might mean – and then at Demetri, for another moment, and found that her old friend was looking at her the way that Ysabel used to look at spiders, like a cured phobia, so that where once there may have been fear there was now only apprehension.

Apprehension made sense, she thought ruefully. He finally had nowhere to run from her.

She eased herself into the seat that would have belonged to the co-pilot, and gazed out at the sky. Her guess had been correct – they were flying low, mostly under the cloud cover. They'd be using up a ton more fuel flying this way, she thought, and hoped he knew what he was doing. There was no trace of doubt on his face, or in his hands, as he guided the… what was it called, a yoke?

He caught her watching. "I promise," he said. His voice was low – husky, the way Täj's usually was, like he had picked up the latter's smoking habits in the last hour. "We're not going to crash."

"I felt better before you felt the need to deny it."

Trajan had enjoyed flying, though the king was infrequently permitted to do so, due to scheduling and safety concerns; nonetheless, he had, on multiple occasions, brought Mordred and Demetri flying with him, the two boys bundled together and wrapped up against the cold, owing to Trajan's favouring old-fashioned, open biplanes. He had brought Liara a few times, when she had asked nicely, and one of the boys would always hold her hand during take-off, partially to reassure themselves, partially to reassure her. They needn't have worried; she had never found it too inspiring of either fear or wonder. She remembered that, and wondered if it was something genetic that made someone yearn to break gravitational holds, to aim for the sun, to ape Icarus in style if not in substance. Liara, personally, had never had that impulse, never understood the urge. As a teen, she had always slept on flights, no matter how long or short.

Always, until now.

Demetri shrugged. "To be honest, I'm trying to reassure myself as well."

She paused. "Well," Liara said, "_that_ is enormously concerning."

Demetri smiled, and then she smiled as well.

Promising.

Without her needing to ask, he leaned forward, and indicated. "This is the glareshield panel. Autopilot and all our readings – heading, altitude, speed. We're making good time for Masr. This is the primary flight display – environmental readings, air speed and some altitude indicators. The navdis – this one, here – that's wind speed and wind direction."

"The wind seems strong."

"It is. We'll make it, but we're burning through fuel pretty quickly trying to fight through this weather." He caught the expression on her face, and shook his head before she could ask. "You know the phrase, _under the radar_?"

"Literally under?"

"That's the goal." He gestured towards the instrument display at the rear of the pit, and said, "backups. Battery-powered, magnetic. Don't look so worried. We look like a supply plane, and we'll be treated as one."

He was talking, and smiling, and there was absolutely no life behind his eyes. He was going through the motions of charisma, Liara thought, playing the role without liking any of his lines. There was something so utterly false and sweetened about it all, like spun sugar.

"If you say so." She looked at the nearest dial, where numbers were flicking up and down, seemingly without meaning. "Learning to fly seems… extravagant, for the rebellion."

He shrugged. "Antonov An-2."

"I'm sorry?"

"It's a Russian plane. They use them for crop-dusting in the southern provinces. And firefighting, sometimes, around Angeles and Fennley. Small, fixed-wing craft. Beginner's vehicle, so to speak."

Liara said, "that's funny. You always said you wanted to be a fireman."

He laughed. "What?"

"Rather than a king. You wanted to be a fireman. To help people, and be in the thick of things, but not a soldier. Mordred wanted to be…" She paused. Demetri waited. "A doctor? Shit, was it? Yeah. A doctor."

He smiled. His voice was fond as he said, "I remember. And you wanted to be… a ballet dancer?"

That was correct. She hadn't expected him to remember.

She hadn't expected him to _know_.

Because Demetri had always been quite set on his future as king. Responsibility instilled at an early age, not to shirk your responsibilities. And he had _hated_ fire, to the point of phobia. And Mordred… he had wanted to be a historian. Something with paper, something in the back corner of a library, where he wouldn't have to talk to people unless he wanted to, and study things that had been without having to make decisions about what must be.

If Demetri hadn't been taken, Liara thought, maybe he could have been. The image of a still kind-eyed Mordred bent over a set of books… almost enough to make her smile. And if Demetri hadn't been taken, there was no question. He would not have strayed.

"Imagine if we had stayed." Her voice sounded hollow, even to herself. In that split second, she missed Mordred more than she could have imagined she was capable. He was her best friend, her oldest friend, the most stable and constant point in her life – and right now, she was further from him, from home, than she had ever been. With people that might turn on her. With people who were _lying_. "Do you think we would still be friends? Me, a dancer. You, a fireman."

"A fireman," the man who called himself Demetri said, and avoided her question utterly as he continued, "I guess it's ironic."

She didn't need to ask what. "Yes," she said, to the King of Ashes. "Ironic indeed."

* * *

Eden managed to sleep for a short time - not nearly long enough, for when she woke she found that there was still a sharp, insistent pain behind her eyes that suggested a stress migraine was incubating somewhere deep within her skull. She and Liz had fallen asleep against one another, and she lifted her head off the other girl's shoulder groggily, not sure if the others were sleeping as well or if she had missed some new emergency and cataclysm.

It didn't seem that way. The whole place had the funereal hush of a cemetery, and despite the noise of the wind outside and the fact that there was nothing more important going on, anyone who spoke did so in a muted whisper, and only after first darting a look in the direction of the others, as though to ensure their hushed words did not upset anyone or provoke some new wave of violence. It was a motley and assorted group, Eden thought, and certainly not the crowd that she had expected to encounter at this stage in the Selection.

If you had asked her, on the first day of the Selection, which of the girls would make it to the Elite – no, not to the Elite, to the final five – she wasn't sure if she would have named any of the girls here. Liara Lee, maybe, as the childhood friend of the king. But shy little Yue, rough-around-the-edges Atiena, withdrawn and practical Liz? No. She wasn't sure she would. She wasn't sure, on the first day of the Selection, that she would have known their names.

And yet here they were.

She couldn't quite say that this turn of events was unwelcome, of course. She wasn't sure how many of the other girls would have had the strength to overcome what they had so far.

She hoped Saran was okay. She hoped Wick had found her. She hoped, against hope, that Vardi Tayna was alive somewhere in the ruins of Layeni.

She wasn't sure how much of this she was allowed to hope for. How much more could she hope to hope for?

Liz, stretching out her limbs peaceably beside her, said softly, "what time is it?"

She glanced at the screen on which had displayed the Saharan symbols: የሰሃራ ፌዴሬሽን. Below those characters, a small digital clock display.

Liz answered her own question. "Nearly time for the Report."

The Report. In the rush of the previous hours, even Eden had forgotten that so much of the festival was due to be televised that evening. She wondered what they would show. Had the members of the Report been part of Uzokuwa's attempted coup? Were they Demetri loyalists? Would there be a Report at all?

Enyakatho had helped Eden to escape. She had to trust in that. And she had to trust in what she knew of him – that if he had to die to get his Report in front of the Kingdom, he was willing to do that.

Maybe he had.

The screen flickered and the characters faded, replaced by, quite simply, a tableau of Layeni. Eden had not known the village for long – for her, familiarity was still the farm at Pa's, a broad courtyard filled with chickens and haybales, a little kitten wandering about as an inept hunter, the soft sound of horses and running water some distance away – but it still filled her with some profound sense of melancholy to see the village as it had been only a few hours ago, all neat cobbles and children playing and lovers embracing on the corners.

So much could change so quickly.

There were a few clips of the various events of the festivities that Eden had glimpsed over the course of the previous nights – various dance competitions, singing performances, the sorts of things Eden might expect at a festival in Fennley and then some other things that seemed distinctly Wastelands: shooting contests, performances involving throwing knives and juggling fire, fishing competitions, relays across the bridges. Everyone in the images was smiling, faces glowing from flush and from the lights twined across the various landmarks, lips and skin stained brightly in a rainbow spectrum of colors. It gave Eden the same feeling as when she looked at black-and-white images of the past, the strange sense of pensive wistfulness at what had once been, all the people whose worlds had collapsed inwards before Eden had even known they existed.

There were, here and there, a few flashes of the other Selected girls, without any great focus placed on them. There was Liz, her mouth crooked in a half-smile, sitting by a small crackling bonfire beside Wren, her bright blue hair styled into an elaborate a-line hairstyle, gesturing emotively with a hand dripping with cheap brass rings; there was Liara, visible at the corner of the screen, relaxing on a balcony twined with ivy next to Raphael and Agares, laughing at something one of the older women had said; there was green-marked Vardi Tayna and silver-stained Täj sitting on the railing of the bridge by the river, arm around waist as Uzokuwa gestured emphatically with a drink; there was little Yue, framed amongst other dancers, laughing as she spun, the other girls mere colorful shadows around her, a flash of silver here and a flash of golden there; there was Saran, listening intently to a little girl with her hair wound up with blue ribbons, nodding and agreeing with whatever flight of fancy the child was embarking on, pointing at the dancers in the square.

And there was Eden. And Demetri. Mouths stained orange.

Oh. Oh, yes. She had almost forgotten. Almost.

He had felt so steady, so reliable, so solid. Eden should have treasured that more, in that moment.

From the corner of her eyes, she was vaguely aware of Yue turning her face away and leaning into the wall, shoulders curling.

And then – short clips of interviews. Eden couldn't even remember these being filmed. Could she remember? Yue saying that she thought Liara had the prettiest dress, and Saran saying that Atiena had the best sense of humour, Atiena saying something droll about Demetri's hair, Liara thanking her kind hosts for their hospitality and Liz offering a flower crown to her interviewer. They all looked, Eden thought amusedly, like they'd been given a few drinks right before the cameras had come out.

There was a brief section next that must have been filmed a few days ago, because Wren's hair had still been in a green Mohawk and Farid hadn't yet earned a black eye. Eden tried to focus on what they were saying, desperate for a distraction, desperate for some proof that her attempts to ingratiate herself was working. They were discussing popular opinions of the Selected girls, popularity and theories, and Eden was gratified to see that she was not at the bottom of the polls.

She wondered if her kiss with Demetri would change that fact. Were they eliminating based on popularity?

She wondered if the letters she had found at Pa's house would help, if the kiss did not. She would feel bad, dirtying a dead woman's name like that, using a lost love as blackmail... but Raphael was dead. Eden, and the people she loved, were not. Not yet.

She could still swing this.

Yue was in the lead, with Vardi Tayna breathing down her neck, though Eden had seen the data used to compile these reports and knew that the results varied hugely depending on the demographics. Rebels adored Tayna; citizens of the Kingdom and northerners loved Yue, and preferred even Liara over Tayna. After that, it was Eden, more liked than disliked, which was the most she could hope for, and then Liz and Saran, roughly equal, at the bottom of the poll. They had removed Atiena's place on the display at the last minute, once news had filtered down from High Command that she was being removed from the Selection in favour of a new military role, but Eden had known Atiena had rivalled Yue in popularity, competing with Vardi Tayna for rebel approval without the corresponding issue with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry.

Wren and Farid were reading a few comments. Eden had read most of them before, but Enyakatho had not permitted her to hear those which pertained to her. Something about maintaining a thin facade of impartiality. She focused on those now.

She was too cold. Too aloof, seemed arrogant. Or maybe she was too smiley in front of the camera, too warm, too polished. Or maybe she seemed shy, withdrawn, an unsuitable candidate for queen.

Not for the first time, Eden was deeply grateful that there was no public participation in the Selection. These people didn't know what they wanted.

The other criticisms were predictable, though not necessarily any better founded – Liara was a suspicious figure, too cold, not to be trusted; Yue was too delicate, too sweet, to be queen of the rebellion; Saran didn't seem to have her whole soul in the competition, seemed to have her mind and heart set more on the orphanage of Layeni, on becoming part of the kingdom rather than seducing its leader; Liz, similarly, was seen as removed and detached, too distant, not making enough of an effort.

Farid and Wren managed to make it seem friendly, throwing the comments back and forth and chipping in occasionally. "You've clearly only seen Liz before her coffee fix," Farid said, as though he knew her, as though they were friends, as though he had any reason to call her Liz rather than Lady Elizabeth.

"Yue seems sweet," Wren added, "seems sweet… people think Yue's sweet!"

"People are right," Farid said.

"_Maybe_," Wren said, and laughed. "No, she's a sweetheart..."

Yue was not looking at the screen, but down at her hands. The others were also paying little attention to what was playing out on the Report – it was only Liz, who clearly wanted something else to focus on, and Eden, who was rarely focused on anything else.

The section afterwards was brief. Some stock footage of rebels, of frontline action, of medical tents, of men smiling and women waving, of guns being reloaded and explosions occurring far in the background.

The rebels had breached Fennley. Not only that, the rebels were in _deep _Fennley. Eden could only stare. They were… they were nearing the Angeles border. What was this? Was this accurate, or was it yet more propaganda? Could it be believed?

If the rebels were on the verge of entering the capital… then Eden needed to maintain her position here. She needed _leverage_. Her mother, her family, all of her friends, were a few days away from a nasty encounter with a firing squad. She couldn't believe it.

They were so close – on the edge of seizing the capital – and yet they were so far – fleeing their own kingdom for the refuge of a foreign nation.

Her gut twisted.

_Fuck_, was all Eden could think. _Fuck_.

The next section. The image of the frontlines slowly faded, a soldier's smile wavering and flickering out of existence, and then, bright and abrupt: ruins. A field of destruction. Was this Layeni? No. The rebellion wouldn't show that now. No. What was this?

Eden knew in her gut what this was.

Axiom offices, utterly destroyed.

Ash and dust.

Eden could only stare.


End file.
